It Could Happen Here Weekly 173

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 4 This is Matt Rogers from Los Culture Resist with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

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Speaker 32 We got clear facts. maybe we could calm down a little.

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Speaker 15 Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Speaker 15 So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

Speaker 15 If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 15 Welcome to Ik It App and Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I am your host, Mia Wong.
With me is James Stout. Hi, Mia.

Speaker 15 Happy to be here again. Yeah, I am.

Speaker 15 I don't know i i have mixed emotions about this one so today we are we are talking about how the american state particularly the sort of neoliberal american state of the last about 50 years created elon musk and how it is destroying itself and we'll start with the fun part of this which is that tesla stock is down 25 in the last month yay it's extremely funny the protests are working people are like lighting them on cars on fire literally all over the world like there was just a big rash in france the day we're recording this.

Speaker 15 The pressure is working. He's having a bad time.
25% is just the start. We can get the other 75%.

Speaker 15 Yeah. I mean, and like for people who like, I guess, don't know, the value of Tesla stock is directly tied to Elon Musk's net worth.
Like, obviously, he's diversified.

Speaker 15 He doesn't have all of his wealth in net stocks. But like, when Tesla stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer.
Yep, it's great. It's great.
We love making Elon Musk poorer. Yeah.

Speaker 15 It's the one line we like to see. However, comma.

Speaker 15 So we've talked a lot on this show about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the American state and about all of the people who he is harming and the lives he's destroying, the people who are dead because of his actions.

Speaker 15 And I think it's worth actually getting into how he was produced and how it came to be that, you know, at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously wrote that the bourgeoisie produce their own gravediggers.

Speaker 15 And, you know, his promised inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus far failed to materialize.

Speaker 15 But neoliberalism and like this specific state seems to have produced their own gravediggers, partially in the form of Trump, but partially in the form of Elon Musk.

Speaker 15 And it's worth actually going into the story of how specifically this happened. And also, I think, what neoliberalism is, because this is an important aspect of, I think people are kind of

Speaker 15 aware of the broad outlines of the story of the extent to which, you know, Tesla and SpaceX were built by American subsidies, but but it's worth going into

Speaker 15 some of the more structural elements of how this happened and why.

Speaker 15 So one of the problems that we have here, and I say we have here because this is a problem that Elon Musk has, which is that he simply does not understand what neoliberalism is or how it operates.

Speaker 15 Yeah, he says a lot of things he doesn't understand there.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and unfortunately, he has inherited like the greatest of all neoliberal states.

Speaker 15 So the issue here is that Elon Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed to be, what neoliberalism is, what is sort of weird libertarianism, whatever you call his sort of ideology, you know, is supposed to be.

Speaker 15 And, you know, I get like, he is just sort of a fascist, but on the other hand, he's a product of this wing of that movement that was created out of, out of the neoliberal thing about like, you must like decrease the size of the state.

Speaker 15 You got to, you got to eliminate all regulations. You have to, you know, keep decreasing the size of the state, keep fire, like, you know, fire all government employees, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 15 And again, this is, I think, largely what a lot of people think neoliberalism is, right? They think it's like, okay, neoliberalism is where the state gets smaller.

Speaker 15 And this has always been a fucking joke. Like through this entire neoliberal period, the size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing.

Speaker 15 And this has always allowed a kind of like controlled capitalist opposition to emerge to, you know, when 2008 happens, right? Yeah. The economy, the entire economy collapses.

Speaker 15 And then out of the woodwork come all of these like Rand Paul, sort of like quote unquote libertarians who have a lot of sudden interesting ties to a bunch of fascist groups and like all of these, all these sort of fascist paramilitaries.

Speaker 15 But, you know, they can come out of the woodwork and say oh the reason that the 2008 collapse happened was because uh there was too much government regulation and this is like sort of what bitcoin is right it's like ah the evils of capitalism are happening because like not enough capitalism yeah well it's because like they but like specifically like the the evil entrenched interests have taken over the state and you don't have the power to access the things that they do which is obviously you know like it is obviously true that these people have control of the state and you don't but this sort of controlled opposition of if you put us in power we'll eliminate parts of the state we'll get rid of all this regulation that you can suddenly be in power.

Speaker 15 This has always been a controlled opposition thing, you know, and this is, this appears in the form of sort of libertarianism or like on the most extreme engine, anarcho-capitalism. Yeah.

Speaker 15 And this is something that the Montpellier Society, which is like the people who basically invented neoliberalism and where all like their academics come from, they still have conferences.

Speaker 15 They've always had a problem with this.

Speaker 15 where there's always been a branch of anarcho-capitalists there who think the only thing that the state should do is enforce contracts or just that it shouldn't exist.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 And the neoliberals are like, okay, you guys are fucking ridiculous.

Speaker 15 And the reason they think this is that the actual thing that these people believe, and this is something that if you read more Hayek than just like the road to serfdom, right?

Speaker 15 That's like the stuff for public consumption.

Speaker 15 If you read the stuff that you write for public consumption, if you read sort of like Rope Key and you read all of the all of the sort of theorists who develop what becomes the IMF and

Speaker 15 you go through all the different schools, what they actually believe,

Speaker 15 contra the things that they say were like, oh, markets naturally emerge and the state just like like exists to control them.

Speaker 15 What they believe is that you have to use the state specifically to create markets.

Speaker 15 And you have to use the state to discipline workers through just pure violence until they become sort of like good neoliberal market subjects who go to work, go home, buy things, and do nothing else.

Speaker 15 And the product of this is the 1980s, right?

Speaker 15 It's the replacement of the welfare state, you know, which is the sort of carrots of this system, with just the pure stick of the police baton and the prison system.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's the end of like the post-second world war welfare state order, right, that we saw, like certainly in

Speaker 15 the U.S., but mostly in Europe, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 15 But this, and this is very important, this never actually decreased the size of the state because what the state, you know, what it was, was it was a shifting of sort of recourses and allocation away from like the state giving you things towards the state, you know, like beating you over the head with a hammer and also insofar as it gives you things, making you go through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever sort of like scant welfare policies still exist.

Speaker 15 Yeah, the state's surveilling you, both for violence reasons and for withdrawing your benefits reasons.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and this is always something that all of these people have supported, right?

Speaker 15 Now, the other important part for our purposes is the thing I said earlier about the state creating markets. And that's kind of like an abstract thing, right?

Speaker 15 There are sort of historical examples you can go through to look at what this looks like in a place where there aren't markets.

Speaker 15 But this is something that's very important because a huge amount of what Tesla is, is a direct result of, you know, pure neoliberalism in action, which is the state stepping in to create a market as its way of doing regulation and the way it interacts with the world.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And so here we need to get to carbon credits.
Now,

Speaker 15 selling off carbon credits, they're also called regulatory credits. In 2024, the selling of carbon credits was 43%

Speaker 15 of Tesla's net income. 43

Speaker 15 yeah so we should explain what a carbon credit is if people aren't familiar yeah well axios has numbers on this their numbers are that since 2014 34 of the total profits of tesla are are from selling these carbon credits so the way the system works is that the epa sets standards for how much is this like you know you can read the axios thing too but like the EPA sets standards for how much like CO2 per mile all of the cars and trucks combined that a car company makes can emit.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 instead of doing the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just going to be like a firm cap on these emissions, they're like, no, no, no, you know, this is what I say when I say they create a market.

Speaker 15 So what happens if you go over the cap isn't that like, you know, like people get hauled off the jail or whatever. What happens is that you have to buy someone else's carbon credits.

Speaker 15 And if you're below the cap, it gives you credits you can sell to other companies. So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right? Their cars produce like zero basically, like...

Speaker 15 Yeah, they don't have any fossil fuel use at all within their line. Yeah, yeah.
Now, obviously, like, where is it? You know, you can ask the question, where is that electricity coming from?

Speaker 15 But, you know, like, but that's, that doesn't get factored into it, which is part of the sort of problem with trying to use the state like this to solve. Right.

Speaker 15 It doesn't look at life cycle emissions. It just looks at driving the car emissions.

Speaker 15 You know, this is the problem with trying to use a regulatory state like this to solve the problem of climate change by creating a market.

Speaker 15 And so Tesla makes, and again, this is this last year, this was 43% of its net income came not from selling cars, but from selling these carbon credits.

Speaker 15 So what they're doing is making it so that other companies can produce more cars that are less fuel efficient, can produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids. Yeah.

Speaker 15 It's why you couldn't get a plug-in hybrid EV pickup truck.

Speaker 15 I think there may be plug-in hybrid Mavericks now, but like the reason that no U.S.

Speaker 15 manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup truck, like the F-450 Lightning, that they have now, is because they could just trade with companies like Tesla instead.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And this is a fucking disaster for climate policy because...

Speaker 15 Instead of having all of the car companies just like dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one car company that makes electric cars and then all the rest of the car companies increasing the amount of like CO2 per like miles, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 15 And the secondary problem, and this is the problem that we're experiencing now, is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort of, in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of what a market is, right?

Speaker 15 When they explain it, so it's like, ah, it's all this, there's going to be all this like competition in the market. The competition is going to create the best product.

Speaker 15 And what actually happens, and the neoliberals in their private doctrine understand this, is that when the state creates a market like this, what it's doing is handing like a person, like a single individual, a giant monopoly.

Speaker 15 And that's what happens. And that monopoly is one Elon Musk, who has now been handed the title of the richest man in human history by the state's regulatory apparatus.

Speaker 15 Because they've given him basically complete control over, I mean, there are other EV-only companies, but they're minute, right? Rivian or something like that.

Speaker 15 And he's got this scarce resource that the entire automotive industry now needs. Yeah.
And again, this is, you know, going back to the market creation part of this. None of this shit existed.
Right.

Speaker 15 Like carbon caps are not something the market would ever produce by itself or whatever. Like this is a direct neoliberal intervention into the market, which is what neoliberalism is, right?

Speaker 15 It's a neoliberal state coming in to create markets, and the product of it is Elon Musk. Yeah, it's a monopoly.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 And when we come back from ads, we'll go into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon Musk and not all of these other companies that became the sort of single guy and how and how else he's benefited from the state.

Speaker 15 We are back. So, the other aspect, you know, so we've gone into how

Speaker 15 Tesla is built on this carbon credit trading.

Speaker 15 The other aspect of it is that Tesla has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts. The Washington Post, in probably the last

Speaker 15 expose they're ever going to do like this, now that Bezos has been like, we are free market capitalists, yeah like tried to go through and find all of the money in government contracts that they've gotten they totaled it well I think I think they're also including like tax credits and stuff like that but they totaled it at 38 billion dollars

Speaker 15 and that's just the ones that are unclassified which is very important because a bunch of what SpaceX does SpaceX is you know most other company is

Speaker 15 a bunch of contracts for classified like the deployment of spy satellites. So it's definitely way more than that, right? Yeah.

Speaker 15 But this comes to the other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies, like in general, do not make money, right?

Speaker 15 They hemorrhage money for basically their entire existence until they can find a bunch of government contracts that can make them money.

Speaker 15 And Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating shit after 2008.

Speaker 15 And, you know, Wapo talks about this. They got a $465 million low interest loan from the Department of Energy in 2010 that basically saved the company from the brink of collapse.

Speaker 15 Good thing there was nothing else to spend the money on in 2010. No one else needed low interest loans or anything.
It was fine.

Speaker 15 No, no, there was no attempt to build like a giant American high-speed rail system that Elon Musk also killed. Yep.
You know, nothing else was happening. I wasn't living in my car at that time.

Speaker 15 It was fine for me. Yeah.
Thank you, Obama. And so, and so as this goes on, right, the goal of you as a tech company, there's two things you want to do.

Speaker 15 If you're a smaller tech company, you're trying to get bought by a bigger tech company so you can retire on your pile of money. Or if you're a larger tech company, you are trying to amass enough U.S.

Speaker 15 contracts, like U.S. government contracts to like get you to sort of stability.

Speaker 15 And this is what happens with SpaceX. SpaceX now has gotten $18 billion of contracts with NASA.

Speaker 15 And this is sort of a part of like, I mean, NASA has always used government contractors, but like this is

Speaker 15 different.

Speaker 15 Like this is just straight up. They are using Tesla's rockets to do things.

Speaker 15 And this is also part of why like Tesla and Boeing fucking this up is part of why a bunch of astronauts are fucking stranded on the space station right now because these things do not work.

Speaker 15 But

Speaker 15 there's been an enormous amount of money here. And the other thing, you know, this is one of the other sort of like great neoliberal things is that

Speaker 15 a lot of the factories that Elon Musk sort of builds, you know, the ones that are in the U.S.

Speaker 15 are there because they get unbelievable amounts of tax breaks and tax incentives from local states themselves. All of this brings us to...

Speaker 15 you know, one of the other really core aspects of sort of the profitability of Tesla in in terms of selling, in terms of selling cars, by the way, we should also mention, this is something Axios talks about, that like if they weren't able to sell carbon credits, his company would literally never make money.

Speaker 15 Yeah, yeah, yeah. This has been the case.
I wrote about this like, I think, two years ago. Yeah.
I remember writing about this before Elon Musk had gone full fucking evil villain, I guess.

Speaker 15 But that's what they are. They're a carbon credit company that makes cars.
Yeah, but

Speaker 15 even their car sales are enormously bolstered by a $7,500 tax credit for electric cars. Oh, yeah.
I got some tax credit information on electric cars.

Speaker 15 It's now the time. Yeah, yeah.
Do you want to talk about the other one that's driving these unhinged sales?

Speaker 15 Yes, I do, because I have been driving around San Diego and I have seen an obscene number of cyber trucks wrapped in people's business livery.

Speaker 15 And it occurs to me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck, nor do people who need a pickup truck for work by cyber trucks because they suck at being trucks.

Speaker 15 And so I did some digging and I discovered that the IRS has a special tax deduction for vehicles which are rated over £6,000 gross vehicle weight.

Speaker 15 The gross vehicle weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not like the mass of the vehicle if you drove it like off the dealer lot onto a scale.

Speaker 15 That's the maximum operating weight of the vehicle as specified by the manufacturer.

Speaker 15 So like it's your Tesla with, I mean, there are very funny videos of guys like loading one bag of compost into the back of a Tesla and being, it's a great truck for truck stuff.

Speaker 15 The other really funny one is when they try to attach like a winch to it and try to use it to pull uh to pull heavy things, and the back of the truck comes off because it's just like made of like it's like secured by like glue.

Speaker 15 Like, is it a unibody? Yeah, it might not be a body on frame, like a pro, it might not be a proper truck. I actually don't know.
Now, I will look into that afterwards.

Speaker 15 I bet it's, I bet most of the electric or like high mileage pickup trucks are not.

Speaker 15 So,

Speaker 15 yeah, not a good truck, actually.

Speaker 15 Under it's called section 179. Under section 179,

Speaker 15 a vehicle with a gross vehicle rate rating over £6,000,

Speaker 15 you can deduct up to £31,000 in the first year rather than deducting the depreciation of the capital good over time, right?

Speaker 15 So instead of instead of deducting the depreciation of your vehicle that you purchased your business over time and not paying tax on that amount, you cannot pay tax on £31,000 in the first year of your vehicle if it's over £6,000, right?

Speaker 15 There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles, like if you've got a Maybach or something really fucking heavy. So that would even cover the Model X, right? The Tesla Model X have a GBWR above that.

Speaker 15 With a truck, there are exemptions for work vehicles, and they have to have a separate cargo compartment that is not the driver's compartment, that is six feet or more in length.

Speaker 15 So the cyber truck just happens to have a six-foot bed. Woo!

Speaker 15 Yeah. So you can deduct 100% of value in the first year, from what I understand, for these vehicles, which have a six-foot bed.
At least this was the case when I was looking.

Speaker 15 I became aware of the exact nature of this when I went on the Cyber Truck Owners Club forum and looked what tax-deductant people were doing, right? And then I worked back from there.

Speaker 15 And it does seem that people are doing this. I think it might be changing, so you can only deduct a certain percentage soon.

Speaker 15 It will shock listeners to hear that I'm not giving you tax advice, nor am I qualified to do so. I'm not an accountant.

Speaker 15 This is not accounting advice. On top of that, Mia mentioned the IRS Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit, right? That's a credit, not a deduction.

Speaker 15 So the deduction would discount the amount of your income that you pay tax on versus the credit, which is just rate credit.

Speaker 15 So potentially the person could deduct the cost of the cyber truck plus the cost of wrapping the fucking cybertruck rate to prove it's a business vehicle.

Speaker 15 And then if you're wrapping it, from what I understand, like these deductions somewhat depend on the percentage of the vehicle's use that is business.

Speaker 15 I guess this could be like the equivalent of a fringes on the flag tax theory.

Speaker 15 People People claiming that when they're driving their cybertruck to go to Whole Foods, but it's wrapped, they're advertising their business, so it's a business use.

Speaker 15 I don't understand how viable that is as a claim.

Speaker 15 Well, you know, but like part of this is like it's very easy, like, especially right now when the IRS is being gutted, like it's very easy to do this kind of bullshit. People are not getting audited.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 So they can take a 7,500 commercial vehicle, clean vehicle credit in addition to deducting that much. And like,

Speaker 15 you would struggle to persuade me that that is not why a lot of people are buying cyber trucks, right? Like it's got the weight rating, it's got the bed size.

Speaker 15 Like it's a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily, you know, like not all trucks have six foot beds now. I will never buy a new truck because I can't find a truck that has like.

Speaker 15 a decent seating arrangement and a larger than six foot bed and four by four and doesn't cost more than I earn in a year. But like it's quite a like niche overlap of trucks that apply.

Speaker 15 And like for a truck with a six-foot bed and a 6,000 pound gross vehicle weight rating, the cyber truck's pretty small and it fits kind of

Speaker 15 with people who don't actually need a work truck, but can nonetheless take advantage of the work truck tax deduction.

Speaker 15 So once again, thank you government for subsidizing the shittiest vehicle on the roads today. Yeah.
And it's worth noting.

Speaker 15 So like Tesla, you'll see a bunch of things about how Tesla is like one of the like best-selling like car manufacturers, right?

Speaker 15 And part of it is from this, but also, you know, and this is, this is the other aspect of this. It's worth noting.

Speaker 15 There's a very good Bloomberg article out today by Amanda Moll that talks about how 50% of all American consumer spending is now by people in the top 10% of the income bracket.

Speaker 15 So people make $250,000 a year or more.

Speaker 15 And that means increasingly that everything in the United States reflects the, you know, the sort of like cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes who all also want to buy this for their sort of like like cultural grudges and you know to like to own the libs and like show how like much of a fucking man they are yeah and you know and and and so you already you have that initial incentive and then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax incentives that you get from buying this vehicle that like definitely this is like designed with the shit in mind yeah without a doubt and it becomes like you say it becomes like a status good and it becomes like a culture war signifier yeah in addition to all those things i guess people also like i've noticed that there's been a lot of backlash against people who own teslas like if you go on the front the day we're recording the top article on the front page of reddit on the third article reddit the top post is is someone who's who's been putting pictures that say sell your car it's got a picture of musk zeke heiling on people's teslas in boston yep yep yep shout out to that person yeah Okay, so we're going to take a break.

Speaker 15 And when we come back, we're going to sort of finish this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going.

Speaker 15 We are back. Now, I think this, this all, I think if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard of most of this.
I actually, okay, you've heard of most of what I've said to some extent.

Speaker 15 I don't think you've heard what James has said before because I've seen very little coverage of this.

Speaker 15 But there's also something deeper going on here.

Speaker 15 The deeper thing going on here is that Elon Musk, on a fundamental level, is also a product of the endless bubble economy that we've all been living in for decades now.

Speaker 15 It's a product of an economic policy that the economist Robert Brenner calls asset Keynesianism.

Speaker 15 So regular Keynesianism, right, is about, you know, having the government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation. Also, you know, also like the military too, right?

Speaker 15 Like let's not sort of like sugarcoat it, but it's about using a bunch of state money to like make there be jobs and using this to sort of, I don't know, the way they call it is like countercyclical spending, but it's like they want to use the state to spend money to make there be jobs and to put money into the economy and to put goods into the economy to counteract economic downturns.

Speaker 15 Asset Keynesianism is still the state spending a bunch of resources, right?

Speaker 15 But it's the state expending those resources both bureaucratically and in terms of incentives and in terms of sort of tax structures, and specifically also very much in terms of the Federal Reserve's interest rates,

Speaker 15 specifically to increase the price of stocks. And also, you know, and, you know, the reason he calls it assets, right? Because it's not just stocks, right? It's also things like real estate.

Speaker 15 It's to increase the value of speculative assets, things that you buy because you think it's going to be worth more later. I have talked about this a lot on this show.
This has been the fundamental

Speaker 15 global economic strategy of most of the world's economies ever since sort of Japan kind of pioneered it. in the 80s as after the U.S.

Speaker 15 sort of like kneecapped its entire domestic sort of export manufacturing economy to the plaza accords.

Speaker 15 And by the end of this fucking administration, everyone who listens to the show will be able to explain what the plaza accords and the reverse plaza accords are. That's when we stop.

Speaker 15 It won't happen here after that because you'll all understand and you'll stop it. Yeah.
It can no longer happen. Yeah, you'll know.
You'll know. You'll know the origin of the economy.
Yes.

Speaker 15 So, again, again, the plaza accords, the U.S. forces all of these countries to increase the value of their currencies relative to the dollar.
This makes American manufacturing more competitive.

Speaker 15 It nukes all of their manufacturing. These countries need to find another place to, you you know, develop their economy, right?

Speaker 15 And the thing that the solution Japan comes to is real estate speculation. This blows up.
This blows up in the 90s. This is a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse stuff is from this.

Speaker 15 And then the U.S. is forced to do the reverse plaza accords in the 90s.

Speaker 15 This is Bill Clinton and sort of annihilate American manufacturing in order to sort of prop up the rest, like prop up Japanese manufacturing to keep their economy from completely imploding.

Speaker 15 Japan was a number two economy in the world at that point.

Speaker 15 But again, this, this means that the U.S. has now been doing this.

Speaker 15 There's the famous things called the Greenspan puts where like to try to stop a market collapse that was obviously coming when the tech bubble blew up.

Speaker 15 Greenspan kept cutting the interest rates over and over again, trying to keep the bubble from collapsing and just making it bigger. And then eventually it blew up.

Speaker 15 This is what 2008 is was, you know, we, we, we did a whole bubble. I mean, there's, there's, there's another bubble and collapse in between there.

Speaker 15 But like, you know, and this is what we've been doing for the last two decades, like since since 2008, we've been creating this giant tech bubble.

Speaker 15 And this tech bubble shit and this sort of asset speculation is also a huge part of the value of Tesla stock.

Speaker 15 It's just, you know, people who've been given a whole bunch of access to cheap credit and by, and by people, I mean, like not really you and me, like a bunch of unbelievably rich people have access to like incredibly cheap loans and they use that money to buy Tesla stock.

Speaker 15 This is a sort of cyclical thing that just continuously increases the value of the company. And it's not just sort of like banks and investors.

Speaker 15 A lot of money that goes into Tesla comes in there from state pension funds. Yep.
From a bunch of bunches of a whole bunch of different countries and also like a huge number of American states.

Speaker 15 Like your teachers' pensions are all tied up in this because yeah pension reform the way that we sort of like lost the pension as as a normal thing was that it was you know it was converted to 401ks and the people who still have like regular state pensions all of that money is now sort of invested in the stock market and it puts a billions of dollars in into tesla every year yeah and so this is also another aspect this is this is the broader structural level on which on which u.s macroeconomic policy was designed to create a bunch of companies like tesla and then u.s sort of like micro micro policy, the micro creation of markets through tax credits and, you know, all of these government contracts that they've been given to do like everything from like fucking build these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit.

Speaker 15 Right. And like the U.S.
is like contracting out Starlink now. I mean, like all of this stuff, right, is literally how Elon Musk was created.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 But there is a third, even deeper level. in which, you know, we can look at

Speaker 15 how

Speaker 15 these cars are actually produced and how these rockets are actually produced. And they're produced by just incredible, the incredible exploitation of a huge number of workers.

Speaker 15 And I think people tend to think about, you know, Tesla workers in the U.S., but there's Tesla workers all over the world. There's a huge giga factory in Xinjiang.

Speaker 15 You know, there's factories all over China. And, you know, these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit.
They work in unbelievably dangerous conditions.

Speaker 15 And at the end of the day, they get a very small amount of money so that the richest man in the world can get fucking richer every day. Yeah.

Speaker 15 And that's before we consider like ingredient parts to Teslas, right? Like the Lithium and

Speaker 15 that we just addressed, for instance, in our episode on Congo.

Speaker 15 There are parts for your test, your Tesla that come out of this country where there has been a war for as long as most of us has been alive.

Speaker 15 Really very little effort has gone into improving conditions for people there, certainly for workers there, doing jobs that are essential to like our economy. And to like

Speaker 15 Mia and my 401k line going up comes from exploiting workers in Congo to an extent and elsewhere in the world. Yeah.

Speaker 15 And you know, this is something that's something our standard of living is based off of. But at the end of the day, right?

Speaker 15 Elon Musk's, all of Elon Musk's profit comes from the fact that the state's monopoly on violence is used to stop all of these people from ever attempting to resist him.

Speaker 15 It's deployed in order to stop these people from taking back the fucking value that they create.

Speaker 15 Now, unfortunately, all of this sort of neoliberal tinkering we've seen for the last 50 years, right, this attempt to sort of like depoliticize everything and have everything run by neoliberal technocrats and sort of have this sort of like non-politics where you're voting for two parties that are like literally even more the same than they are now.

Speaker 15 This attempt to do things like solve climate change, through these promotion of carbon markets and create this sort of like stable like capitalist hegemony forever has ultimately been self-defeating.

Speaker 15 It's why all attempts to regulate capital inevitably fail because the functioning of the capitalist system and particularly the function of the way this version of neoliberalism has worked has concentrated

Speaker 15 like the most wealth ever held by a single human being into the hands of one guy who was a Nazi.

Speaker 15 And then these people use their wealth to accumulate political power and seize control of the state, dismantling the systems that were meant to regulate them.

Speaker 15 And you can't solve this problem with regulation. Because again, eventually they will simply accumulate enough power, retake power, and eliminate the regulations.

Speaker 15 You can't even solve this problem just by killing them. I see people talk about like the killing of billionaires in China as an example of this.

Speaker 15 And like, A, that's all political factionland fighting stuff.

Speaker 15 And B, they'll execute people specifically to sort of appease like the Chinese workers so that they never have to fucking watch the PLA get run out of Shanghai again. Yeah.

Speaker 15 But the thing is, even if somehow you use the state to just kill them, right, it doesn't work because capitalism will just produce more of these people.

Speaker 15 If you actually want to stop this, if you want to stop this Elon Musk from destroying the entire country and quite possibly ending all life on Earth by fucking with America's nuclear weapons

Speaker 15 until there's simply not enough safety mechanisms to stop someone from accidentally sending one off, you are going to have to destroy them completely.

Speaker 15 The permanent base of their power, the power of the oligarch, the power of the billionaire, the power of the dictator, must be broken.

Speaker 15 This tiny group of men cannot, as a class, be allowed to own the stores and factories and fields and hospitals, supply chains to produce everything we need to survive. It must belong to us.

Speaker 15 We create their wealth. The only way to save this world is to take it back.

Speaker 15 If we want to save democracy, the only way to do it is to extend democracy into the spheres where Elon Musk rules as a tyrant.

Speaker 15 Democracy must march into the workplace to slay the beast at its lair before the despotism of the workplace consumes our political democracy and leaves us with despotism there too.

Speaker 15 They must cease to rule. They must cease to exist, not as individuals, but as a class.

Speaker 15 And the only way to do that is by giving control of their power and their property and their wealth to the workers whose subjugation produced all of it in the first place.

Speaker 15 That is the tax that we have in front of us.

Speaker 15 The challenge that we face is that we face effectively the entire might of the American state, which is the most, like one of the most powerful apparatuses of oppression that has ever been built.

Speaker 15 Our advantage is that that apparatus of repression is currently being run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are, and I cannot emphasize this enough, maybe the two figures most emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan, after his extensive study of a whole bunch of revolutions on the Revolutions podcast, concluded to be the great idiots of history,

Speaker 15 who, by their sheer and unmatched ability to make the wrong decision at every single moment, are what makes revolutions possible.

Speaker 15 And if these people are not the great idiots of history that allow us to bring them down and stop them from destroying everything that has ever been in this world that is good,

Speaker 15 then nothing else is.

Speaker 15 Yeah, we have the one great stroke of good fortune we have, right, is that all power has been concentrated in the hands of complete idiots who are addicted to Diet Coke

Speaker 15 and

Speaker 15 being mad at their children. Yep.
And they, you know, we have already seen they don't understand how this apparatus works, right? They fired the nuke police by accident.

Speaker 15 yeah so like it's very funny that they're stripping themselves of the means of coercive violence yeah when we started mate you spoke about controlled opposition right and the idea that like the the great debate of our time is is how much state regulation we should have and how much unfettered anarcho-capitalism we should have they are drinking the kool-aid yep that got them in power that is The one thing going in our favor right now, that they are dismantling the means of coercive violence because they genuinely believe the myth that if the state didn't exist, they could be even more wealthy and even more tyrannical.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And well, and the second advantage that we have is that they have set about systematically alienating every single group of people who they would need as their political base.

Speaker 15 They are pissing off the military. They are pissing off the intelligence services.
They are going through and they are like systematically pissing off the farm states.

Speaker 15 And, you know, like the farmers obviously do not have that, like, don't fucking matter, but they're pissing off the agro-businesses.

Speaker 15 They are individually going through and pissing off a whole bunch of

Speaker 15 the country's scientific resources. They're going through.
They are like fucking with the Social Security Administration.

Speaker 15 They are individually going through and pissing off every single group of people on earth who matter.

Speaker 15 And people who, like us, under this system, aren't supposed to matter until we fucking do something about it.

Speaker 15 And, you know, the other big thing that we have right now is that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he would do.

Speaker 15 And by pulling apart his base of support and by putting together coalitions of some of these people, and not all of them, some of them, some of them you just need to divide and conquer by getting them out from backing him, right?

Speaker 15 Like the whole thing with the Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution was that people just mostly stayed home. Yeah.
And that when that was how they won.

Speaker 15 Like that's, that is largely what we need. We need these people to stay home, but these people can and will, if we have anything to say about it, be fucking driven home.

Speaker 15 And hopefully we can bury both the gravediggers and the people whose graves they were digging in the same spot in the dustbit of history and never have to deal with these fucking assholes again.

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Speaker 25 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 26 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 28 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 29 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 32 We got clear facts. Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 34 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 35 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 36 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 37 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 40 Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis, and I'm joined today by a special guest host, Richard Todd.
Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 41 Thank you so much for having me. I am completely excited to be here.
I am a listener of the show, so it feels like getting to be on a show that I actually freak out too often.

Speaker 40 And I'm very excited for you to be here because you have a special report on one of the people who I've been cyber stalking for years.

Speaker 40 And I'm very excited to hear the details of what she's been up to these past few weeks.

Speaker 40 I kind of know the rough overview because again, because of my cyber stalking, but I've not done a deep dive the way you have. So I'm very excited to hear an update on this on this character.

Speaker 41 So it sounds like we are in a similar place when it comes to this person. And this person is none other than Candace Owens.
First of all, what are your thoughts on her?

Speaker 41 Because I am low-key fascinated with her. I follow her on social media.
I watch her videos. Like I, I am like weirdly captivated by her.

Speaker 40 I mean, I've, I've covered her mostly through her involvement with Daily Wire. I've talked a little bit about kind of how that all fell apart, you know, like a year and a half ago or so.

Speaker 40 I've talked a little bit about her involvement in Turning Point USA with Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 40 And she's just kind of been one of like these like random, you know, like like orbiters of like the online like right-wing content sphere for like i don't know the past six years at least and i typically focus more on like like you know like the ben shapiros the matt walshes you know back in the day the steven crowders and stuff but candace was always just like around and like she definitely like went after a different demographic than what like my usual focus is right like i'm i'm i'm focused on like what's going on with straight white men like why why are they like this and who who is targeting them and you know and that's you know that's like the matt walsh like steven crowder kind of angle but like candace owens has like a kind of a broader net that she targets with her content so like she's always kind of come up as like a side character i i don't think i've ever done like a distinct focus on her before besides just you know whatever kind of crazy post or like you know anti-trans or like very like weird like racist rant that she goes on like every once in a while Yes.

Speaker 41 So there is so much to talk about when it comes to Candace Owens. I'm sort of like you.

Speaker 41 Like I sort of saw her as a side character, but only recently have I realized, like, oh, people in my life are listening to Candace Owens and citing Candace Owens, and they have no idea any about her, anything about her backstory.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 41 All the stuff that you, that you were just talking about.

Speaker 40 She's like reinvented herself like multiple times.

Speaker 40 And, you know, some people who mainly come at this from like the anti-fascist research perspective might not be aware of her like latest rebrand, which is what I'm excited to hear about today. Yes.

Speaker 40 I just remembered how she had that whole event with Kanye when she did her like BLM documentary. That was a whole other Candace era.

Speaker 15 Yeah, so much. Oh my God.

Speaker 41 I have to say, I was like low-key embarrassed for her because like during her Kanye West era, she was like, Kanye West designed the couture outfits for my blexit movement.

Speaker 41 And Kanye West was like, no, I fucking didn't. And like, I was like, ooh, that's so embarrassing that you like, that you like publicly aligned yourself with Kanye West only for him to basically like

Speaker 41 diss you publicly right after. Yeah.

Speaker 40 And then come out as like an explicit neo-Nazi like two weeks later. Yes, yes.

Speaker 41 Ugh, Candace, girl. So I want to talk about her.

Speaker 41 Like, I don't want to spend too much time on her background, but there are some pieces that I think like are good for understanding kind of who she is, this chameleon figure that she's been. Totally.

Speaker 41 If there is not like a behind the bastards on her, do you know if there is? There should be if there's not. Not yet.

Speaker 40 Like similarly on Bastards, she's been one of these like recurring characters.

Speaker 41 Oh my God.

Speaker 40 But she has not had a distinct focus.

Speaker 41 Robert Evans, get on it because we need the Candace Owens behind the bastard. So Candace grew up in Stanford, Connecticut.

Speaker 41 While she was a student there, she went through this horrible sounding racial harassment.

Speaker 41 A classmate left her like this racist death threat on her voicemail that turned into like a pretty serious local scandal because it turned out the student who made that threat via voicemail did so in a car with a group of students that included the son of the then mayor and then future Democratic governor of Connecticut, Daniel Malloy.

Speaker 41 So she got tons of support from the local chapter of the NAACP, and her family ended up suing the Stanford Board of Education in federal court for failing to protect her rights, resulting in a $37,500 settlement.

Speaker 41 She went on to study journalism at University of Rhode Island before dropping out.

Speaker 40 And this is like the early 2000s?

Speaker 41 Yes. This was like young, like baby Candice, high school Candace, before she was the Candace Owen that we know today.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 41 So I sort of like almost see a little bit of myself and where she got her start.

Speaker 41 Like me, she was an early adopter of using the internet to talk about things like race and politics.

Speaker 41 Like me, that also seemed to sort of manifest in a lot of like low-hanging fruit shit posts on the early days of blogging. Like in 2015, she was writing blogs making fun of Trump's penis size.

Speaker 15 Sure.

Speaker 40 Many such cases.

Speaker 41 Yes, many such cases.

Speaker 41 So in 2015, Owens is writing a blog called Degree 180, where she wrote pieces criticizing conservative Republicans, writing about the quote, batshit crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party.

Speaker 41 The good news is they will eventually die off peacefully and in their sleep, we hope, and then we can get right on with the obvious social change that needs to happen immediately, she wrote on her blog.

Speaker 41 So back then, she was really someone who had like a progressive point of view and was doing a lot of public writing about what she was seeing and experiencing in politics at the time.

Speaker 40 Yeah, no, this is something that I guess some people might not know if they've only like become aware of her through Daily Wire is, yeah, like in the pre-2016 like BuzzFeed internet kind of sphere, she was just, she was just like one of like these people who would, yeah, have like, you know, progressive, like-ish takes, criticize embarrassing like politicians and like overtly racist stuff happening.

Speaker 40 And then the degree to which this like heel turn happens is like one of the most stark examples I've seen in like a

Speaker 40 I don't know. I'm trying to think of it if there's like any like exact parallel.
I know like there's like certainly some like detransition, like grifters.

Speaker 40 There used to be like ex-gay influencers or, you know, this like proto-influencers kind of before influencers were a thing, like ex-gay speakers.

Speaker 40 But yeah, the switch around on Candace from these blog posts is so concentrated.

Speaker 41 So in her own words, she describes it as happening overnight.

Speaker 15 There you go. Yeah.

Speaker 41 How it happened is like fascinating to me.

Speaker 41 So in 2016, when Gamergate was in full swing, Owens launched a Kickstarter for a project called Social Autopsy, which she described as a way to catalog the abuses of trolls and cyberbullies.

Speaker 41 Fun fact, that Kickstarter is still up today. It is such a weird time capsule of a different time.

Speaker 41 There's like a video of her speaking earnestly about the need to like have the internet be a like safer, more equitable landscape. It is nuts.

Speaker 41 Like people should go listen to her speaking about this project.

Speaker 41 So, the plan for this project was essentially that she would create a way to de-anonymize online commentators and then connect them with like their real names and their real life employers.

Speaker 40 And what's so funny is that, like, that is the very same argument that a lot of people use, people who like want to restrict the open internet still use today that like problems on the internet, online harassment and abuse would all be improved if only everybody had to use use their government id and government names to access the internet and so like it's very funny that that idea it was bad then and it didn't really die it was just recycled into today yeah i mean like there's a version of this that happens or at least it kind of used to happen more in regards to like anti-fascist research where like you're like you know identify specific like extremely racist accounts or like explicit neo-nazis and contact their employer in an attempt to get to get them fired so they can focus on getting a new job and supporting themselves rather than doing racism online and in person, especially if he's like, you know, a member of like a group, whether that be, you know, the Proud Boys back in the day or many, many other groups, Patriot Prayer, now Patriot Front, that sort of thing.

Speaker 40 It's funny how hated this tactic is soon to be by people like Candace and the Daily Wire people, but here she's advocating it herself. Exactly.

Speaker 40 In this like post-Anita Sarkeesian kind of content like world.

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 41 So pretty much everybody thought this was a bad idea, including video game developer Zo Quinn, who folks might remember was kind of at the center of Gamergate and was like viciously attacked.

Speaker 41 Owens was subsequently harassed and doxxed, and she blamed Zo Quinn and other feminists for this and said so publicly. As you can probably guess, like people like Milo Yiannopoulos loved this.

Speaker 41 People who were promoters of Gamergate really hyped up Owens' claims that like, yes, feminists were actually the ones doing all the online harassing.

Speaker 40 Okay. I can see where this is going.

Speaker 41 So this event is what Owens credits with her turn from progressive to quote becoming a red-pilled radical. She says, I became a conservative overnight.

Speaker 41 I realized that liberals were actually the racists.

Speaker 15 Liberals were actually the trolls.

Speaker 41 She starts promoting right-wing viewpoints on her YouTube channel, calling herself, quote, red, pill, black, which I got to say is like pretty good branding.

Speaker 41 Like, I'm not mad at the branding there. It's like, okay, black woman talking about like right-wing stuff.
Red pill, black. I get it.
I get it.

Speaker 40 Yeah, I'm interested to see how much, uh, how much the checkbook was a consideration here.

Speaker 15 Oh, yes.

Speaker 40 How much her Kickstarter got versus how much she realized she could get if she jumped on the other side of the content churn.

Speaker 41 Well, she almost instantly gets noticed by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Points USA, right? And he hires her almost immediately. She starts cranking out these videos that really perform quite well.

Speaker 41 Like her videos really go viral. Videos where she's doing things like dismissing the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Speaker 41 Alex Jones gets her to co-host some of his InfoWar show. She's doing stints on Fox News as a paid commentator.
Like business is booming for Candace Owens from this turn.

Speaker 40 Yeah, this is around when I became aware of her.

Speaker 41 Yes. In 2021, she joins up with the Daily Wire.
There was so much fanfare around them hiring Candace. Like it was a big deal.
She moved to Nashville.

Speaker 41 Fun fact, there was even a House joint resolution, House Joint Resolution 350, a resolution in the Tennessee government to congratulate Candace Owens on relocating to Tennessee and for her work at Daily Wire that reads, whereas Miss Owens has earned the admiration and respect of millions of Americans through her activism in support of President Trump as a black woman and her perceptive criticism of creeping socialism and leftist political tyranny.

Speaker 40 Very cool stuff.

Speaker 41 Yeah. Imagine it being like a joint resolution in your local government when you move someplace.

Speaker 40 Yeah. The governor of Tennessee was like super excited when the Daily Wire relocated their headquarters to Tennessee and brought in all these people.

Speaker 40 Like there was there was like so many like private dinners, meetings.

Speaker 40 There was like a number of resolutions welcoming the Daily Wire to Tennessee in this like 2021 period as they were just starting to like launch their own like streaming service website, which is why they recruited Candace is because they were looking for content creators to fill out their slate.

Speaker 41 So you would think that this should be like a match made in heaven, right? Smooth sailing, they need incendiary content creators. She's an incendiary content creator.
Should be a match made in heaven.

Speaker 15 Perfect.

Speaker 41 Not quite, because things end in like this really messy public fallout just a few years later. So I know that you've done episodes on this.

Speaker 41 From my perspective, and I would love to know what you think, it's not 100% clear what went down, but the public friction between Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro, one of the founders of Daily Wire, it seemed to be like related to reactions around the situation in Gaza.

Speaker 40 Yeah, totally.

Speaker 41 So Ben Shapiro is Jewish, and Owens, as we said, has said and done like a lot of anti-Semitic stuff, like a lot.

Speaker 40 And like actual anti-Semitic stuff, like that people use that as a way to like shut down like very

Speaker 40 uh very admirable like like like pro-palestinian like activism uh no like cannot just is anti-semitic and this it's like same thing with like jackson hinkle and she made it like an escalating series of anti-semitic claims after october 7th which which slowly kind of like broke with the company and been like more and more and more of it over a series of a few months.

Speaker 40 Yes. And

Speaker 40 it's funny because like it also kind of mirrors this like online fight she had with Steven Crowder like a year or so prior when Daily Wire was trying to recruit him.

Speaker 40 And then she got informed about like how like abusive he was to his wife. And then she went on like a media blitz like against him as like as he was in negotiations like with the Daily Wire.

Speaker 40 She's like very willing to like stir shit up, like even if it like goes against her own interests or the interests of like whatever company she works for.

Speaker 40 Like she is, she is absolutely willing to like make like some kind of like chaotic spectacle, regardless of her own like, you know, financial security, I guess.

Speaker 41 Yes. Like she, I'm so glad that you mentioned that.
She is not afraid to get down and dirty in public.

Speaker 41 And I do think like, you know, as a black woman who works with a lot of white men, I would imagine that she's probably thinking like, I have to have some kind of decorum.

Speaker 41 I don't want anyone to say that I'm being a crazy black woman or whatever. She, it's, it seems like she has no such qualms.

Speaker 41 Like she is like, I will, I will make this a public messy fight and I am not afraid to make a genuine spectacle of myself.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 41 And so it is really important to note that, like, as you said,

Speaker 41 she wasn't just like criticizing the Israeli state. She was like getting into like blood libel and like deep conspiracy theories.

Speaker 40 Yeah. No, it was, there were some really nasty posts.

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 41 Like one of the things that she said, she's claimed that Judaism was quote, a pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons and child sacrifice and that she was waking people up to the fact that pedophiles are in power, like stuff like that.

Speaker 40 Not great. Not good.

Speaker 41 Not good. So as you said, like this starts to become like a public feud toward her employer.

Speaker 41 She wrote on Twitter, no one can serve two masters and ended her post writing, you cannot serve both God and money, to which Ben Shapiro, her boss, tweets, like quote, tweeted, oh my God, like Candace, if you feel that taking money from the Daily Wire somehow becomes between you and God, by all means, quit.

Speaker 41 Like, messy is that?

Speaker 41 It's crazy that instead of having like a company meeting they were just doing this on twitter.com oh my god and my messy ass was eating it up I was like keep fighting let them fight oh yeah no absolutely I'm totally willing to like watch this watch this go down I do not want to get involved right right right owens like went on Tucker Carlson's show and said that Ben Shapiro was quote acting unprofessional and emotionally unhinged for weeks now uh she said that shapiro quote crossed a certain line when you come for scripture and read yourself into it i will not tolerate it very cool cool.

Speaker 41 Yeah. So at one point, Owens tweets that she wants Ben Shapiro to have a public like debate with her, moderated by podcaster Patrick Bette David.
Ben Shapiro was having none of this.

Speaker 41 He tweets, Candace, I can see why you'd want to hide behind a moderator, particularly one who said we should rename our company, quote, Daily Jewish Wire just yesterday. No.
Jesus.

Speaker 41 One-on-one, Monday at five. We can sit down and have a healthy debate like adults and we'll live stream it on X and YouTube.
Take it or leave it.

Speaker 41 As to the true reason why you didn't respond to my offer to sit down with you and discuss these issues publicly or privately back in February, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

Speaker 41 Like this is lawyer employee going at it on Twitter.

Speaker 40 I can't believe I'm taking Ben Shapiro's side here, not just because he's Ben Shapiro, but also because he's an employer. But it's a really, it's a really tough situation here.

Speaker 41 Yeah, I feel the same way because like, It's just not a great look to have somebody that you just hired to all this fanfare coming at you like this on Twitter.

Speaker 41 Like, and I think, I mean, this is just my opinion. So, like, take that for what it's worth.

Speaker 41 Just as somebody who has worked in media and been around the block, the reason why I'm not comfortable saying like their feud was entirely based on Owens's anti-Semitic comments and behavior is that she just went so hard and so public that something to me, I almost wonder if there was like a contract dispute here that like she was like, oh, I can make more money on my own.

Speaker 41 I got to get out of this contract or something. Cause like, it just doesn't smell right.
I mean, yeah.

Speaker 40 If she had like an inclination that she could afford to lose this job because she might make more money on her own, then yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 40 That that would that would allow her to push this further than what she might otherwise might.

Speaker 40 Like there's been a lot of a lot of discussion in the right-wing content sphere about like the Daily Wire's very fairly restrictive contracts, despite still getting paid like tens of millions of dollars.

Speaker 40 There is like restrictions on like what happens when you lose monetization because the Daily Wire is like a company trying to make a profit.

Speaker 40 So totally, there could absolutely be other financial stuff going on here. I think it's more like an interlocking series of issues rather than just one thing or another.

Speaker 41 Yes.

Speaker 41 So, after Rabbi Shmuly Botich criticized Owens for her defenses of Kanye West, Owens liked a tweet asking Bouteach if he was, quote, drunk on Christian blood again.

Speaker 41 And I guess that was the final straw. A few days later, Daily Wire and Candace Owens ended their relationship with Owens tweeting: the rumors are true.
I am finally free.

Speaker 41 Okay, so that's what happened with her and Daily Wire. So, where is she now? Well, this is where the story gets interesting because I had not heard from Candace Owens in a minute.

Speaker 41 And my reintroduction to her happened recently when I was trying to make sense of the dispute between two Hollywood A-listers, Blake Lively and Justin Beldoni.

Speaker 41 So the issue between Blake and Justin, it's a little bit complicated and ongoing, but it's actually a pretty interesting story that includes a lot of things that I enjoy, like how celebrities use media and how social media platforms can be weaponized for or against specific people.

Speaker 41 Email correspondence where people make themselves look terrible in writing because they do not expect those emails to be in a deposition later. Like that is my favorite thing in the world.

Speaker 41 Like please continue to put your wrongdoing in writing so that my nosy ass can read it later and be like, ooh, messy.

Speaker 41 So I do encourage like folks to read up on it because it does go beyond just like two celebrities having a feud, but you don't really need to know the specifics for our purposes.

Speaker 41 The quick and dirty version is that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were in a movie adaptation of the very popular novel by Colleen Hoover called It Starts With Us.

Speaker 41 In December, Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment and starting a smear campaign against her. Baldoni strongly denies that and has sued her in response.

Speaker 41 Both camps have released information like emails, text messages, and video attempting to make the other look bad.

Speaker 41 So it has kind of turned into one of those inkblot tests that changes depending on whose version you buy.

Speaker 41 Version one is that Blake Lively was being sexually harassed on set by a fake feminist ally who is actually an abusive man, or version two, that Blake Lively is an egomaniac who was using her star power and A-list celebrity network like her husband, Ryan Reynolds from Deadpool, to control the narrative around her being a nightmare on set and steamrolling everybody on this project.

Speaker 15 Cool.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 41 And so it's what's interesting about this to me is that it's one of those stories where algorithmically it depends on what silo or what pocket of the internet you're at

Speaker 41 to determine like what version of this story you're getting. Like much like Johnny Depp's defamation lawsuit.

Speaker 40 This sounds too much like the Johnny Depps thing. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Exactly.

Speaker 41 Exactly. And so like, for whatever reason, TikTok thinks I hate Blake Lively and want to pour over every nuance of how she is a fraud, right?

Speaker 41 Like, but someone else's TikTok might be like, no, Blake Lively, we should be supporting her.

Speaker 41 Like, it's one of those situations where just depending on where you are on the internet, you might get a very different impression of the public sentiment leaning one way or another.

Speaker 40 Yeah. Yeah.
This is all the types of things I try to avoid learning about at almost all costs. So

Speaker 41 yes, I do not blame you.

Speaker 15 So

Speaker 41 I was trying to get to the bottom of it because I kept hearing about it. Like everyone was talking about it.

Speaker 41 So I'm talking to my cousins who I would lovingly describe as normies and that they are not super online. It's like they're not like you and me.

Speaker 41 They're not like deep into the depths of extremism or anything like that.

Speaker 40 No, they're, they're not watching like the Daily Wire for fun slash for work.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 41 And my cousins are like, oh my God. There is this black girl journalist who has been following everything and breaking it down.
She has all the tea. We'll tag you.
That journalist was Candace Owens.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 15 So, all right.

Speaker 41 You know, Candace has been making so many videos off of this. And like her coverage, if you coverage in quotes, has really taken off online.

Speaker 41 As the cut put it in a piece called Candace Owens Has Gone Mainstream, they write, the right-wing commentators' coverage of the Blake Lively Justin Baldani case has reached millions of viewers.

Speaker 41 Owens' podcast was hours and hours of analysis of the case, deep dives into court filings, tabloid news stories, even Ryan Reynolds's recent SNL 50th anniversary special appearance.

Speaker 41 One listener said, she's really been able to go in and pinpoint discrepancies in some of the things Blake Lively has said, rather than us having to go through it on our own.

Speaker 15 Ah, of course.

Speaker 40 It's the woman who's lying about being sexually harassed, of course.

Speaker 41 One listener of her podcast says she recognizes that Owen seems to have a pro-Boldani bias, but she doesn't care because, quote, she's urging us to look past the fact that this is not a feminist issue at all, that it's about getting justice for whoever is being wronged here.

Speaker 41 here. She's uniting the left and the right.

Speaker 41 The right-wing women's magazine also published a headline about this saying how Candace Owens is uniting conservatives and liberals with her it ends with us coverage.

Speaker 41 So her coverage of this dispute has really allowed her to attract a lot more viewers beyond her like normal right-wing extremist base, which has generally been like a lot of white men, like that who was really listening to her content before when she was with Daily Wire.

Speaker 41 Now she has really branched out.

Speaker 41 So like normies, like my cousins, who have no idea who Owens is, have no idea her background, her past, the work that she has done, and just think like, oh, she's a normal entertainment journalist, like digging and getting the dirt.

Speaker 40 I know she's doing this like on her podcast. I assume YouTube as well.
She also just like trying to like flood TikTok, trying to flood like Instagram reels.

Speaker 40 Like, is this, is this kind of part of how she's trying to like expand her reach?

Speaker 41 It is. Like, she's everywhere.

Speaker 41 And then she has her longer form podcast and YouTube, but then clips of her like you know breaking down the top lies or top inaccuracies and things that Blake Lively has said those go super viral on social media the short clips yeah okay and all of this has been just gangbusters for her growth and engagement uh here's how the cut put it Since Owen started covering the lively Bildani case, her YouTube channel has exploded in popularity, allowing her to attract a much larger fan base than the audience of hardcore conservatives she has amassed over the years.

Speaker 41 Each episode about Lively racks up at least 1.5 million views.

Speaker 41 In the past month alone, Owens has amassed more than 450,000 new subscribers on YouTube, and her total video views have quadrupled since this time last year.

Speaker 41 This is according to data from the platform Social Blade.

Speaker 15 Oh no.

Speaker 41 Over the past three months, her audience on YouTube has almost started skewing 65% female, according to data provided by a spokesperson, a marked shift from her past fan base.

Speaker 41 So yeah, she's exploding in popularity. She's everywhere.
And now she's attracting like normie women who are just coming in for this celebrity dispute.

Speaker 15 Yeah,

Speaker 40 that's probably not going to end well, huh?

Speaker 41 Well, I don't think it will end well. You know, I was like racking my brain trying to figure out like, why has this story taken off so much for Owens?

Speaker 41 And there are a couple of reasons I think this is like working for her. One, I hate to say it, but she is actually genuinely interesting to listen to.

Speaker 41 You know, when she was a progressive voice online, she definitely was somebody who had a point of view and a clear voice and a perspective. And that really

Speaker 41 comes through when she's breaking down Blake Lively and these videos.

Speaker 41 She has a way of speaking that really makes you pay attention and signals to the listener, like, this person is really breaking it down.

Speaker 41 It's the same reason why on TikTok or social media, when someone is like story time or like, I'm about to tell you all the details of something, those videos always perform very well on social media.

Speaker 41 And I think that Owens is just very good at knowing how to hold somebody's attention online. Like, I have to say it.

Speaker 40 Sure. I mean, she's been doing the content

Speaker 40 churn for almost a decade now. Like, yeah, you do get good at it on like a technical proficiency level.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 41 Also, you know, we just love good old-fashioned misogyny. And if that misogyny can be laced with like a conspiracy theory,

Speaker 41 I think that it's even better. So like, I think that part of this is just like social media platforms are always going to amplify misogyny.

Speaker 41 I would argue that things like misogyny, transphobia, massage noir, racism, all of that is like baked into the experience of showing up online as a feature, not a bug.

Speaker 41 And I think that Owens takes it even further because she is breaking it down like she's uncovering some conspiracy. Like it's not just.

Speaker 41 Let's talk about Blake Lively. It's I'm uncovering the web of lies and I'm going to expose Blake Lively's dark truth.
Right. And so like, of course that's going to take off.

Speaker 40 And she does gain this element of authority because she's a woman talking about this. It makes men feel better about being misogynistic because a woman's telling them it's okay to.

Speaker 40 I mean, this is the same thing that she was able to weaponize for all of her like, you know, anti-Black Lives Matter stuff, for all of her, like, like, racism isn't real things.

Speaker 40 She tries to use that to her advantage. mostly to make like white members of her audience like feel good about their own racism because a black woman told them it's actually okay.

Speaker 40 And like that, that's been like a big part of her career the past few years.

Speaker 41 Exactly that. And I think like she really understands the inviting power of taking what you might think of as like a contrarian stance on something.
Like

Speaker 41 after the Michi movement, how many women got engagement by taking a contrarian stance, right?

Speaker 41 Like I think going against the conventional attitude that says like, oh, we have to automatically support the woman in this, in this dispute probably makes people tuning into Owens's breakdowns feel like they're like free thinkers who are going against the grain, you know, by taking an unpopular opinion, which I do think connects to her more odious stances on things like trans people and women and Jewish people.

Speaker 40 Yeah. No, I mean, like, you see the same thing with like, you know, like the gays against groomers thing, right-wing trans influencers, D-trans influencers.
It's the same like Gambit.

Speaker 40 And certainly, I think like, yeah, like your identification of her as like a professional contrarian is like very, very key to her success.

Speaker 41 Exactly. I also think like part of the reason why people are attracted to conspiracy theories is that it allows for like fantasy world building.

Speaker 41 And I think that I really see the ways that she injects that into her coverage. Even the word coverage, I put that in quotes because like she is like a wild person.
So her coverage is like also wild.

Speaker 41 She does not adhere to, as she puts it, quote, a traditional style of reporting.

Speaker 15 You know, I'll take her word for that one.

Speaker 40 You know what?

Speaker 15 I'll believe her on that single point.

Speaker 41 Yeah, I believe her. I believe that.
You know, she amplifies rumors.

Speaker 41 And even once, she read a letter that she said that she got from Blake Lively's husband, Ryan Reynolds, his acting coach when he was 12.

Speaker 41 And according to Canis Owens, his acting coach said that Ryan Reynolds was an obnoxious kid. You know what? I also believe it.

Speaker 15 Oh.

Speaker 41 I have no trouble believing that, but like her coverage, it includes like side characters.

Speaker 40 Yeah, things that have no bearing on this whatsoever. I mean,

Speaker 40 like this this focus on like this like conspiratorial ben is like the same it she's using the same tactics she did for her black lives matter documentary for like most of her political work like it it's she's using the same tactics over and over again and eventually she like reaches this like stress point or this like threshold where she cannot see a path forward or she can't see a way to surpass it and then she does a pivot this happened before with her progressive blog this happened even at the daily wire she does not she she she doesn't work with turning point usa anymore and like this this new pivot is learning, hey, it's super lucrative to be like a tabloid entertainment quote-unquote journalist.

Speaker 40 Very easy, super lucrative. And all of the tactics you learned on the right-wing media sphere work great here.
Like all of this like conspiratorial thinking, really

Speaker 40 a disregard for like facts and evidence works perfect for this sort of like rumor-based reporting.

Speaker 40 And it spreads like crazy. And yeah, it spreads across political lines.
You don't, you aren't just targeting the mega people or like the far right.

Speaker 40 This, this can be so much more broad to like the giant audience of like, you know, quote unquote, like apolitical people go to these platforms for a form of like, of like escapism and entertainment rather than just hearing about politics yet again, because that's, you know, very, very tiring.

Speaker 41 Yeah. And I think in my mind, all of it is sort of, is sort of connected.
Like Ben Shapiro, nobody cared more about celebrities or talked more about celebrities than Ben Shapiro.

Speaker 41 He would love to be like, I don't care what Hollywood is doing, but he was obsessed with like Beyonce and Meg the Stallion. Like it was just like a negative obsession.

Speaker 41 Like, you know, anti-fandom is still fandom. When you make video after video about how much you don't like Meg the Stallion, in a kind of way, you are a fan, just in the opposite direction.

Speaker 41 And so I think that Candace Owens really took that and learned how to perfect it. Cause she is much, I think that she is much better at this than Ben Shapiro is.

Speaker 41 Like the evidence being that like her YouTube channel is exploding with people who probably would never watch any of Ben Shapiro's content.

Speaker 40 The big bummer for me is that the Daily Wire's first film, Ladyballers, left us on a cliffhanger with Candace Owens and Matt Walsh sitting in a car talking about how Matt Walsh planned this entire like plot of the film as like as like some kind of scheme or like social experiment.

Speaker 40 And

Speaker 40 you know, it was implied there would be more. You know, it was like a Avengers Nick Fury type post-credits scene.

Speaker 40 And now we're never going to learn what Candace Owens and Matt Walsh get up to now because she's left the company. She's now doing her own thing.

Speaker 40 So now we just have this dangling plot thread that's just going to bug me forever. Like, what does the Candace Owens character at the end of Lady Ballers do next?

Speaker 40 I'm going to be thinking about this for like years.

Speaker 41 America deserves closure. We deserve to know.
Just putting that out there.

Speaker 40 I think we do deserve closure. I just think my closure is going to be a little bit different.

Speaker 40 I am very fine having all of these plot threads wrapped up quite quickly, but I do not see that in the cards immediately.

Speaker 41 So in terms of where she's at now, like, you know, my question is like, has Owens, has this kind of like mainstream audience that she's been able to amass, Has she changed her views?

Speaker 41 Is she trying to do a rebrand or a pivot? In an interview, she she said, in terms of my perspective, I haven't changed anything. I've been anti-MeToo since long before it was cool.

Speaker 15 Sure.

Speaker 40 I mean, that can be true.

Speaker 40 It's also true that she's getting better at propaganda and widening her footprint, which, yeah, then once her audience gets bigger, she might be able to slip in more things that I would find unsavory to a larger audience over time.

Speaker 40 But she also might be content to... keep growing that and be slightly less off-putting in the meantime.

Speaker 40 But no, I mean, like, there's also just a a huge audience for like the anti-woke backlash, anti-Mewtwo stuff right now. Like, that's kind of, that's kind of like the new mainstream, frankly.

Speaker 40 So I am certain that she's going to try to continue to flex that and grow that in the in the next few like months, years.

Speaker 41 Yeah. So I agree with you.
I believe Owens when she says that like her stances have not changed much.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 41 It's easy to be like, oh, well, she's pivoting to go mainstream now that she has these like women in her audience who are interested in celebrity.

Speaker 41 And you can honestly, you can sort of see see some of this in changes to her physical appearance. Like she was sort of known for having very severe hair.

Speaker 41 The joke being that she had alienated herself so much from her fellow black people that like no black person was going to do her hair. And that's why it looked that way.

Speaker 41 But lately, you've really seen this like softening. She's kind of going for like a softer public look.

Speaker 41 She is pivoting to different kinds of programming. She's branched out into doing a book club for paying subscribers and some kind of a fitness program.

Speaker 40 That makes sense. Yeah, totally.
Like the health guru fitness entertainment bubble. Yeah, that's huge.

Speaker 41 That's such a good grift. She's going to make so much money.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Yeah, she is.

Speaker 41 But I really agree with you, Gare, that like, I think that these new followers are certainly going to be walked down a pipeline that includes her extremist attitudes, just using celebrity scandal as a hook, because like.

Speaker 41 As you said, celebrity scandals and celebrity stories are just considered fluff for a lot of people.

Speaker 41 So like people who care about extremist content and ideology are maybe not seeing that as a space that they need to pay too close of attention to about these stories that you might see on the cover of an Us Weekly.

Speaker 41 But these stories actually can be used to tap into extremist ideologies and unleash them in a whole new audience.

Speaker 41 And like, like you were saying, if you are just like watching a podcast because you're...

Speaker 41 want to be entertained about a story about two celebrities, you might not have your like bullshit detector up to be like, wait, is this extremist content?

Speaker 41 Because it's seen and treated as a less charged space. And so, you know, that line of thinking that says that, you know, this is just fluff.

Speaker 41 It doesn't really matter what happens in celebrity news is not just incorrect.

Speaker 41 It is dangerous because it lends itself to people being more susceptible to it when extremist content is slipped in without even really realizing it.

Speaker 40 I mean, and like that relates even to like the originator of this Gamergate stuff and the whole like anti-woke like media fandom content sphere, right?

Speaker 40 Where so much of like the anti-woke backlash has been built on people complaining that Star Wars is too woke now. There's too many women in movies.
There's too many black people in commercials.

Speaker 40 Where do all the white people go? There's too many gay people in TV. There's too many trans people in TV.
And like that

Speaker 40 is definitely focused on by the rest of the Daily Wire goons. And you can very easily pivot back to that sort of cultural commentary after you're done talking about Blake Lively.

Speaker 40 Like this is this is a very small jump where you're still talking about the entertainment industry, but with this like anti-woke framing of like, you know, why is all these minorities here?

Speaker 40 Why are they pushing transgenderism on kids?

Speaker 40 You know, whether that be talking about, you know, trans actors in the business, whether you be talking about, you know, like female-led or like diversity casting, like all that kind of stuff that especially Candace can use her like contrarian position to speak on authority about.

Speaker 40 talking about why are you recasting these legacy characters to be people of color or why is a woman the lead of this thing when it should be actually a man?

Speaker 40 You know, just like very, very basic stuff that's been a part of like the YouTube slop for a decade now. But it's still like, still takes in a lot of, a lot of clicks.

Speaker 40 And it is, it is a lot of what like the Daily Wire and like right-wing content still does. It's all this like weird like culture war stuff.

Speaker 40 It's very, very tight in with Hollywood. Like you were saying about how like Ben Shapiro claims to, you know, like hate Hollywood.

Speaker 40 He's trying to build his own alternative to it, but he can't can't stop talking about it. Like, he can't stop complaining about Disney's Snow White.

Speaker 40 And I can see Candace doing like the exact same thing, but now with like an, honestly, like a bigger, a bigger, more like apolitical audience that's much more malleable and can be shaped around these like larger cultural trends when you think about this like perception of this backlash against wokeness.

Speaker 41 I absolutely think that's what we're going to see. And I can tell you, we can finish by, I can tell you about her next big pet issue, which is going to be

Speaker 41 championing Harvey Weinstein, who she is.

Speaker 15 No, no.

Speaker 41 So she's been interviewing him since 2022. According to the Hollywood Reporter, she explains, while he is, quote, an immoral man, he is also a victim of the justice system.

Speaker 40 A victim, sure.

Speaker 41 A victim. And she says, I've always had faith in our court system, and now it's beginning to change.
Now I'm beginning to wonder if our courtrooms have been politicized.

Speaker 41 And the thing that's made her think this is Harvey Weinstein.

Speaker 15 It's wild.

Speaker 40 I mean, like, Ben Shapiro is starting his own campaign to free Derek Chauvin. I think there's going to be a lot of pressure on the courts right now.

Speaker 40 I mean, you're seeing that from like Elon and Trump as well.

Speaker 40 I think undermining the authority of the court, I think is actually kind of part of this larger concerted issue amongst the entirety of the right right now, because this is like their biggest remaining roadblock to achieving their right-wing utopia is the court system.

Speaker 40 And I, you know, this may not be intentional on every person's part.

Speaker 40 Like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens aren't, aren't like intentionally collaborating on this, but they may be copying each other's trends.

Speaker 40 And if they're seeing this wider push across a large amount of like the right-wing content people to put pressure on various aspects of the courts, including by using like high-profile cases like Harvey Weinstein or Derek Chauvin, that's not a great sign.

Speaker 40 And

Speaker 40 I can definitely see them trying to do that in conjunction, I guess.

Speaker 41 Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot more of it. Candace has a series coming out called Harvey Speaks that that apparently tells his side of the story.
So look out for that.

Speaker 41 And I think that's the thing.

Speaker 41 Like, I think with her content, like when asked why it was she thought that her Blake Lively stuff was really taking off, she says that she believes her new fans on the left, quote, have just kind of gotten wise to the fact that maybe women lie just like men.

Speaker 41 And so I just implore folks that like, Even if you think that you're just like retaking in this content because you're following fluffy celebrity news or whatever, it is so easy to go from maybe women lie to maybe women can't be trusted or maybe women shouldn't work and have jobs, a stance that Candace herself has actually advocated for, despite very obviously being a working woman.

Speaker 41 And so I don't think we should trust Candace Owens, even if she does this rebrand. Like, don't let her rebrand herself as like just a celebrity investigative journalist.

Speaker 41 Like she put all of these odious views out into the world. And I don't want her to be able to like soften it or, you know, soften what it is that she advocates for and what it is that she believes in.

Speaker 41 If that is truly what she's trying to do, to just sort of like amass a more mainstream audience. So, don't fall for it.

Speaker 41 If you're getting tagged in Candace Owens' videos, just know what she actually is about.

Speaker 40 I mean, yeah, I think, I think for our audience, it's more likely that you'll have like family members who are going to be finding this stuff.

Speaker 40 And you should find a list of sources, maybe this episode included, but probably, you know, you can find some articles as well that give some background on Candace's history and and previous beliefs you can pick and choose some of her most like outrageous claims so when your aunt sends you a video about how ryan reynolds and blake lively are kidnapping children or something uh you can

Speaker 40 you can maybe inform aunt judy that maybe you shouldn't listen to everything this candace owens character is saying yeah this candace owens might not be on the money might not be on the level

Speaker 15 no

Speaker 41 yeah inform an auntie today yes that's right And that's all I got. That's it.
I don't know how you usually end these episodes.

Speaker 40 Usually by getting sad, but I don't know. This has been an interesting dive into the life of a woman with

Speaker 40 many

Speaker 40 careers, many.

Speaker 41 A chameleon.

Speaker 40 Many personalities. A chameleon.

Speaker 40 A chameleon of contrarianism.

Speaker 41 Ooh, I like that. If I ever write a book about her, that'll be the title.

Speaker 40 Jesus Christ. Oh, what a nightmare that would be.

Speaker 15 Man,

Speaker 40 scary.

Speaker 40 Bridget, where can people find you online?

Speaker 41 You can find me on my podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet on this network, iHeartRadio, I mean. You can find me on Instagram at Bridget Marin DC or on Blue Sky at Bridget Todd.

Speaker 40 Well, thank you so much. Good luck in DC.
Thanks for holding the line out there as Elon puts a pilldozer through your entire city.

Speaker 41 We're doing our best.

Speaker 40 I would would love to talk again about a DC update, maybe, maybe next time you come on the show.

Speaker 41 Oh my God. Yes, please.

Speaker 40 There we go. Well,

Speaker 40 we will talk then. Goodbye, everybody.

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Speaker 5 This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture Resist with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

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Speaker 25 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 26 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 28 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 29 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 32 We got clear facts. Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 34 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 35 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 36 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 37 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 40 This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis, still banned from one of the top 15 highest endowment universities in the country, but I am not banned from this podcast.

Speaker 40 Today, I'm joined by Robert Evans and James Stout to discuss the very troubling news

Speaker 40 of students having their visas and/or green cards revoked

Speaker 15 by U.S.

Speaker 40 customs in relation to anti-genocide protests. James, this is something that you've been putting together a piece on for a while.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 Repeatedly trying to warn people of Cassandra-like

Speaker 15 to no avail. Yes.

Speaker 15 Yes. I do feel like we kind of saw this one coming a little bit, but that doesn't mean it's not bad.

Speaker 15 And specifically, the case we're talking about today, I think, is particularly egregious because it doesn't actually involve someone's student visa, right?

Speaker 15 So I've been working for a while on people who actually under the Biden administration were potentially facing deportation, right?

Speaker 15 But the material difference between that and now is that those people were facing deportation because the university removed their visas or the university removed them from the university and therefore their visa was no longer valid.

Speaker 15 In this case, it seems that the order came directly from the State Department to deport a guy whose name is Mahmoud Khalil.

Speaker 15 So Khalil was a prominent activist in the encampment at Columbia, right? But what's notable is that,

Speaker 15 and the events here, as best we can tell, went down like this. I'm referencing an AP article here that we'll link in the show notes.

Speaker 15 ICE agents came to his front door, which is on university property, and told him that they were revoking his student visa and therefore he was being deported.

Speaker 15 He then informed them that he didn't have a student visa, that he was a legal permanent resident, right? Colloquially referred to as a green card holder.

Speaker 15 They then told him, or his lawyer, at some point,

Speaker 15 he got his lawyer on the phone and was communicating with them through his lawyer. They then told the lawyer that they were revoking the green card.

Speaker 15 And at some point, it's reported that they attempted to detain his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, which of course is not a thing that ICE can do.

Speaker 15 So the difference between a legal permanent resident and a student visa is like the place I want to start this because they are materially very different, right? Student visas are pretty fragile.

Speaker 15 People lose their student visas for lots of things all the time. A green card is a much higher barrier.
And

Speaker 15 the revocation of his green card, We spoke a lot before this episode about like exactly kind of where this comes from in Trump's mishmash of executive orders and speeches, right?

Speaker 15 Because after he was detained, we saw Trump truthing

Speaker 15 about specifically using the word green card. We also saw Marco Rubio tweeting about removing green cards, right? Rubio being the Secretary of State.

Speaker 15 Normally, the green card wouldn't be a State Department thing. No.

Speaker 15 Seems the most likely course of events, as far as we can tell from what we know right now. Today is the 10th of March, is that

Speaker 15 ICE came thinking he had a student visa. It's not particularly uncommon for ICE raids to not have all the information on someone, from what I understand.

Speaker 15 I mean, this is just a police thing. Yes.
It's not just police.

Speaker 15 Cops who are doing raids very often don't have all or accurate information. Yeah.
ICE in particular very often don't have a judicial warrant.

Speaker 15 They have a warrant that they made, they'll sign themselves, which is a different thing.

Speaker 15 They're supposed to require a warrant to get onto Columbia University campus, but as of now, I don't believe Columbia have clarified that they did have.

Speaker 15 And I think their policy also allows for them to allow ice onto campus in like exigent circumstances so we'll have to see what exactly that warrant was for and why exactly columbia allowed them onto campus so it seems like they came attempted to revoke this guy's student visa realized he didn't have a student visa detained him anyway and then kind of ex post facto the uh these tweets and statements came out but Garrison, you found some stuff in, I mean, Trump has made previous statements that are kind of unclear, right?

Speaker 15 He uses the word aliens a lot.

Speaker 40 Yeah, so we've been trying to kind of figure out the exact details of like what is going on,

Speaker 40 what justification they have for doing this, and how we can like extrapolate this out to larger trends because deporting like legal residents for college protests is pretty insane.

Speaker 40 And also the rhetoric coming out of the White House and like the White House like social media accounts around this incident is like extremely worrying.

Speaker 40 Like the way they're basically putting up like wanted posters for protesters.

Speaker 40 And in general, the way that the White House account has been doing this like own the libs, like mimetic nationalism that the past few weeks has been, has been really upsetting.

Speaker 40 And this has continued around this issue. And I think it is worth focusing on this as like a specific escalation.

Speaker 40 Because you had people like Mamadou Tal, who I think Cornell tried to revoke their student visa and then he

Speaker 40 in some way negotiated back into that to stay on the interim provost. John Ceciliano eventually ruled in Tall's favor, so he did not end up getting deported last year.

Speaker 40 And now this new development in relation to the Columbia protests is a significant escalation. Yeah.

Speaker 40 Because not only is this not just like the university revoking an F1, which they do have the authority to, this is like coming directly from the Trump administration, where they are going after specific students without the involvement of the university and students who may be legal permanent residents.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Garrison found a fact sheet on Whitehouse.gov where Trump is quoted as saying, quote, to all resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice.

Speaker 15 Come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you. And that would seem to include the legal permanent residents.
Yes. Yeah.
Right. Like, resident alien is a tax status.
Yes.

Speaker 15 But again, like, I think it's quite possible that the

Speaker 15 vagueness in the language is deliberate. not necessarily from Trump, but there are other people within the Trump cabinet who might seek to use that vagueness for things like this, right?

Speaker 15 Like who might see that as a benefit. Yeah.

Speaker 40 Well, and you see that with other things, like with like with Rubio's State Department directives on trans people right now, where they keep the language intentionally vague.

Speaker 40 They leave the enforcement up to like individual actors, and then they can eventually figure out the logistics in court once people be like, oh no, this is illegal. Yeah.

Speaker 40 So like, yeah, it is vague because they want to test the actual full authority of their power.

Speaker 40 But I think the specific fact sheet, which is like a sister article towards this executive order, says, like James was saying, to all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice.

Speaker 40 Come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you.

Speaker 40 I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.

Speaker 40 So there you have him saying both resident aliens, which we can infer probably refers to green card holders as well as student visas. So like these are

Speaker 40 two separate things that he has specifically named as going after.

Speaker 40 And now you see more direction from Rubio after this arrest that happened on Monday.

Speaker 40 You see more direction from Rubio and the State Department in specifically naming legal permanent residents as targets for removal and targets for ICE actions, which is is not something that is extremely common.

Speaker 15 Yeah, where I've seen it before is like in cases of material support for terrorism, which, but that has quite a high bar of proof, right?

Speaker 15 That that's like a listed organization approving a material, i.e., financial or physical support, right? Like in-kind donations.

Speaker 15 Like I've written about a guy who was providing material aid to the Islamic State called Siki Ramiz Hodzik, sending stuff from Bass Pro, actually, like thermal scopes and hunting scopes and things like that.

Speaker 15 But that has a much higher bar than this, which

Speaker 15 we will see.

Speaker 15 Like, because we have a legal permanent resident here and they're seeking to revoke that, I imagine we will see a court case and we will see exactly the justification for revoking his green card in that court case.

Speaker 15 That will be sometime in the future.

Speaker 40 Let's go in a quick break and we will come back to discuss some more of the details on what Mark Rubio is actually saying and where this could all end up.

Speaker 40 Okay, we are back. I would like to talk about specifically some of the rhetoric that Rubio has been using since this arrest and a little bit of what he was saying before.

Speaker 40 Like we were saying before the break, some of this kind of vague language can kind of be used to their advantage.

Speaker 40 And this is certainly like riffing off of very vague language that Trump would use on the campaign trail, right?

Speaker 40 Where he would talk about wanting to jail or deport protesters, like in general, regardless if they're student visa holders, green card holders, or just U.S. citizens, right?

Speaker 40 Like Trump has made statements about wanting to do all of that. And campaign like off-the-cuff statements and actual like government policy are two different things.

Speaker 40 And right now, like they're trying to figure out where the line between that is, like how much of this rhetoric can be turned into government policy.

Speaker 40 And we mentioned like the fact sheet from that, from the executive order that I believe was signed in January, which is, you know, to quote unquote combat anti-Semitism.

Speaker 40 And then, like, last week, so before this arrest happened, we had a post from the Secretary Mark Rubio Twitter account, official, quote: Those who support designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, threaten our national security.

Speaker 40 The United States has zero tolerance for foreign visitors who support terrorists. Violators of U.S.
law, including international students, face visa denial or revocation and deportation, unquote.

Speaker 40 So that one specifically focuses, I would say,

Speaker 40 pretty firmly on people who have student visas, right? He names like visitors.

Speaker 40 And then after the arrest happened, he posted a different statement on his own personal account, quote, we will be revoking the visas and or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so that they can be deported, unquote.

Speaker 40 sharing an AP article.

Speaker 40 And then the Homeland Security DHSGov account posted on March 9, 2025, in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism and in coordination with the Department of State, U.S.

Speaker 40 Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.

Speaker 40 ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump's executive orders and protecting U.S. national security.
Unquote.

Speaker 40 And there's now been a flurry of posts from both the White House account and DHS accounts basically posting like a picture of of this person saying that he's aligned with Hamas in celebration, almost like styled after a wanted poster, but instead it just reads like arrested.

Speaker 40 And that is like the, that's the rhetoric that like they're using right now on their official accounts.

Speaker 40 Something that like James, I think, noted, it's important to like

Speaker 40 think about if ICE was just freestyling this action or if there was a directive beforehand to go after green cards specifically, right?

Speaker 40 And it seems like, at least for the people doing the raid, they did not care,

Speaker 40 nor did they know. They weren't informed.
They just were told to go after this person from someone higher up, right? And that very well could be Rubio.

Speaker 40 I mean, a lot of DHS is being ran by Stephen Miller right now. A lot of this feels very Miller-esque.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 We got an update.

Speaker 15 As of the time of recording, I've just discovered that Mahmoud Khalil's lawyers filed a lawsuit challenging his detention, and a judge in New York City, a federal judge obviously, ordered that Khalil shouldn't be deported while that court then considered his case.

Speaker 15 Yes, I was going to bring that up. So that also, like, his case will be considered in New York City, which is probably good for him as opposed to a more conservative jurisdiction elsewhere, right?

Speaker 40 Totally. Like this happening.

Speaker 40 in Texas, like in all of those districts where Elon Musk is trying to set up his corporations because there's friendly judges, this would be handled quite differently, right?

Speaker 15 Yeah, this is something migrants I speak to are at least aware of of sometimes that they don't want to enter into Texas because the Fifth Circuit is seen as less favorable to them than, say, the Ninth Circuit, where they would be if they entered in California.

Speaker 15 I'm sort of surprised if it is a Miller joint, that it isn't someone like UT Austin or somewhere like that.

Speaker 15 No, they're going directly after this individual in part because he's somebody that a lot of folks who might otherwise be like up in arms about a move like this would say because of some of his connections and some of the things he said in the past.

Speaker 15 Well, he's, you know, supported groups that are really bad.

Speaker 15 Like, I think they're really trying to find the first case is they want someone that they can calve a lot of like liberals off from being too scared to support because he said some things that like they don't want to have attached to them.

Speaker 15 Like that's, that's how they're, and they're going to keep pushing that further and further each time.

Speaker 15 You find some folks who you can scare off a lot of maybe what you might call like their otherwise natural support base because you can point out this thing or that thing they did that was, that was not great.

Speaker 15 Yeah, HTLU types. Like, when I'm not, I'm not insulting or trying to say bad things about this guy.
I'm just saying, like, that's that's the tactic here, right?

Speaker 15 Is to try to paint this guy as like, well, this guy did this, but do you really want to support that?

Speaker 15 Which is why you have to take an incredibly firm stance that no, the government doesn't get to do this. The State Department doesn't get to do this.

Speaker 15 Yeah, regardless of any things that this person may have said, that First Amendment is for everyone. I don't care what he said, you know?

Speaker 15 So, like, it's also worth noting that Columbia specifically, the Intercept has reported on this, that there is a a WhatsApp group called Columbia Alumni for Israel.

Speaker 15 And they have been explicitly trying to identify these students and to call for prosecution and, I guess, persecution of these students.

Speaker 15 And I think the Columbia encampment. was particularly objectionable to a lot of people.
That was kind of the one that got a lot of the national focus and the reporting, right?

Speaker 15 So it's understandable that that's where they went for this.

Speaker 40 Yeah, it's high visibility.

Speaker 40 And I think it's also very likely that they are just looking to have a test case for this to see if they can create legal precedent for removing people's green cards for, you know, anti-genocide protests, right?

Speaker 40 And the specific details of that will become more and more and less important based on like the results of the case. Yeah.
As long as they can create that precedent, right?

Speaker 40 And specifically, like the precedent for revoking a green card, something that's pretty substantial. Yeah.

Speaker 40 They want something that's like, you know, in their mind, like the most favorable towards their outcome. So I mean, that's part of what they're trying to do with this specific case.

Speaker 40 And like, it is, it is very much in line with, with Trump's campaign rhetoric and versions of what Trump has said before.

Speaker 40 And now you're seeing someone like Rubio, someone who's, you know, a little bit more policy-minded,

Speaker 40 taking steps towards this outcome.

Speaker 15 Yeah, which I think is, you know, like the other thing they didn't get to do, I guess, is that they weren't able to deport the guy at hyper speed, which they have been doing with some people. Yeah.

Speaker 15 He was detained in New York and then moved to Louisiana.

Speaker 15 People were very upset about this, rightly, because it's removing him from easy access to his lawyer and to his family and to his eight-month pregnant wife, right?

Speaker 15 That's all things that shouldn't be done. It's also something that the Biden administration did routinely.

Speaker 15 We have other episodes on this, actually, especially in San Diego, where we have some funding that allows people who are detained access to legal assistance.

Speaker 15 It has been very common for those migrants to be then moved to Texas.

Speaker 15 I've seen it with migrants I've met at the border and I've looked for them in the ICE immigrant detention locator and they've been moved to Texas. It's not uncommon at all.

Speaker 15 So it's bad that it happened. It was bad that it happened under Biden.
It's still bad that it's happening now. We shouldn't have let it happen then.
We shouldn't support it when it happens now.

Speaker 40 And I think before we go and break it again, I do want to kind of close this section by talking about how like they don't necessarily need an executive order specifically allowing Trump to do this.

Speaker 40 Or like Trump doesn't need to make an executive order explicitly for this uh based on like immigration deportation law like there will be an argument made in like in court that that they they have justification for this action already this is something that like i've already been through when i immigrated to the country and like did like my citizenship interview right like if you if you have discussed in the past you know something that can be construed as support for a terrorist organization, that does disqualify you from U.S.

Speaker 40 citizenship.

Speaker 40 So there's going to be a lot of arguments

Speaker 40 around specifically these terrorism statutes that will make someone like this a subject for removal.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 40 And that's going to be like the angle in which they go about this. And I think that's worth keeping in mind.

Speaker 15 I also think it's worth, and I don't want to make this, because a lot of people online have, this shouldn't be our immediate primary concern.

Speaker 15 Our immediate primary concern should be Mahmoud and the other people like him who are in situations like him who are going to be targeted.

Speaker 15 But I don't think it's unreasonable to say that like if they get away with this, at some point that we'll start saying like, look, any support for Palestine the government describes like or any support for any group that the government considers a terrorist doesn't matter if you were born here as a citizen you know we can start like that is that is a potential in state of this which is again not

Speaker 15 should not be on your front burner. It should be the people being targeted right now, but also an awareness of like, this is part of why you have to draw such a hard line.

Speaker 15 Like if the situation was reversed and this were a democratic administration coming after an anti-vaccine student activist who is a permanent legal resident, it would be wrong for them to disappear,

Speaker 15 right? Like that has to be like where the line is drawn. Yeah.

Speaker 40 Yeah. The state should not have this like ability.
Like we should not let them get away with this and we should put as much support and legal support into preventing this from happening.

Speaker 40 I really can't say which way this, this will go. Like immigration law is one of the most like headache-inducing things I've ever had to go through in my entire life.

Speaker 15 He will be spending a lot of money on immigration lawyers now. Yeah.
Also, be really clear: I'm not equating support for Palestine to being anti-vax.

Speaker 15 I'm just saying, like, if this was like a shitty guy, right? It would still be wrong.

Speaker 40 But people, if it's something that we like to laugh at for

Speaker 40 getting measles in Texas, disappearing people back.

Speaker 15 Yeah. If he thought Russia was doing anti-fascism in Ukraine, it would still be important, right?

Speaker 15 Right. You know, to do this.
And, and

Speaker 15 should we take a break and come back and discuss some more? Yes. Yes.

Speaker 15 I wanted to give a little bit of background here, some of the stuff that I've been looking into. So, on the 5th of February, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a series of memos.

Speaker 15 One of these was establishing a quote October 7th task force, and I'm going to quote from it here, to prioritize seeking justice for victims of October 7th, 2023 terrorist attack in Israel, addressing the ongoing threat posed by Hamas and its affiliates, and combating anti-Semitic acts of terrorism and civil rights violations in the homeland.

Speaker 15 It then lifts several action items for the FBI, right?

Speaker 15 Among them is investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism, anti-Semitic civil rights violations, and other federal crimes committed by Hamas supporters in the United States, including on college campuses.

Speaker 15 The final point is, quote, supporting efforts by the Israeli government, Department of Defense, and Department of Treasury to pursue non-criminal responses to to the October 7th attack and other terrorist activities by Hamas.

Speaker 15 There's a couple of things that are concerned. Obviously, like non-criminal responses could include deportation, right?

Speaker 15 Like if the person is not being accused of a crime, but nonetheless having their visa revoked.

Speaker 15 Also, the idea of cooperating with a foreign government, a government which is currently committing a genocide, potentially against US citizens or U.S. residents, is quite concerning.

Speaker 15 It's especially concerning when we talk about that Trump executive order that we've already discussed, right?

Speaker 15 One of the parts of that Trump executive order that I noticed that I haven't seen any reporting on was the, quote, inventory and analysis of all the Title VI complaints and administrative actions, including in K-12 education, related to anti-Semitism, pending or resolved after October the 7th, 2023.

Speaker 40 Can you explain what Title VI is?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I can, Garrison, and I would love to. So Title VI is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, right? It prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin.
DEI. Yes.

Speaker 15 It applies to federally funded programs, activities, or institutions which receive federal funding, right, which will cover almost every institution of education in this country, apart from some like religious private schools.

Speaker 15 I guess maybe they still get some federal funding.

Speaker 15 There have been a number of Title VI cases filed for anti-Semitic discrimination and anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab or Islamophobic discrimination since October the 7th, 2023.

Speaker 15 The ones filed for Islamophobic discrimination don't seem to be covered by this, but the other ones do.

Speaker 15 The Biden administration kind of rushed to finish up and resolve some of these in the last few weeks of his tenure. And normally the results were pretty

Speaker 15 ineffectual. It was like some more trainings, a review of policies.

Speaker 15 Anyone who's been an educator at one of these institutions will have already been very familiar with the sort of anti-discrimination training video that you have have to watch.

Speaker 15 And they were suggesting that you watch more of those videos. I'm not really convinced that that is the way we deal with hatred, but that's what they recommended.

Speaker 15 The Emory one, I thought, was interesting because they told Emory that it had to commit to a, quote, equitable handling of protests after its campus police were so violent towards anti-genocide protesters.

Speaker 15 A lot of the other cases are still pending, but it seems like the Trump administration is going to go back and review all of them anyway.

Speaker 15 It does seem like whether it spread organically or whether it was some kind of campaign to file Title vi complaints a lot of title vi complaints were filed after october 7th like and during this time when we saw like campus protests and we saw support by some faculty for those campus protests right and we saw some faculty who may or may not have supported the protests but felt very strongly about the right of students to have freedom of speech on campus and i'm sure they would have been kind of wrapped up in this big dragnet too that this potentially raises the specter of like at least career threatening and again lots of faculty are not US citizens, right?

Speaker 15 They might be permanent residents, they might be married to citizens, they might be here on a visa.

Speaker 15 There are a number of different immigration statuses that they could have that are not US citizen that they could potentially lose.

Speaker 40 So what is Trump trying to do about these cases, which could be pending or have already been resolved?

Speaker 15 Yeah, well, what they said is they want to familiarize institutions with the grounds for inadmissibility. So that that's not allowing someone to enter the United States, right?

Speaker 15 Under, I won't read out the section of the United States code, but a section of the United States Code, quote, so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and comma, if warranted, comma, actions to remove such aliens.

Speaker 15 So it's in there, right? Like this is in Trump's late January executive order. Yeah.

Speaker 15 This is the legal argument that they're making there, and they're asking universities to do some of that legwork for them, it seems.

Speaker 15 I imagine that this is the same section of the United States code that we'll see used with reference to Khalil.

Speaker 15 But it refers to like excludable or inadmissible aliens, which is people coming into the country.

Speaker 15 But I guess they could make an argument that he disguised his inadmissible status or became inadmissible. Sure.

Speaker 40 I mean, there's these two sections, right? There's this one that revolves around who can be like admitted, who can be accepted.

Speaker 40 And there's that one section, which is, I believe, section 1227, subsection A4A-C, which is the section specifically on deportation as relating to like supporting quote-unquote terrorist activities.

Speaker 40 So I think they will try to use these both like in conjunction.

Speaker 40 And I think it's also important to note out here the use of the word like aliens as opposed to the word that like Rubio was using previously, which is like visitors, right?

Speaker 40 Like visitors, I would say, probably

Speaker 40 applies more to like student visa holders.

Speaker 15 Yeah, non-residents. Versus aliens.

Speaker 40 Aliens can be anyone, right? Like aliens can be any non-citizens. They can be visa holders, can be green card holders, right?

Speaker 40 And so at least in like the official wording here, they use the word, I think, aliens is important as opposed to like Rubio's like, you know,

Speaker 40 posts on x.com, which now become official policy because we're in the hell world.

Speaker 15 Yep.

Speaker 40 That refers to like just like, you know, know, visitors to this country.

Speaker 15 Yeah. The right has used aliens for a long time, right? Because it differentiates them from people.

Speaker 40 Yeah, it's like, it's very basic, like dehumanization language.

Speaker 15 Yeah, right. In this case, I think it's important.
It's pivotal. So like we have a sense of what will happen there.

Speaker 15 Maybe I could just finish up by saying if you are faculty or a student, if you're encountering this, you can reach out to us. using our encrypted email.

Speaker 15 So if you'd like to reach out to us, it is coolzone tips at proton.me. It's only encrypted if it's encrypted from the sender as well as a recipient.

Speaker 15 So that would mean using a Proton or other encrypted email to reach out rather than using an unencrypted email. If you'd like to reach out again, coolzone tips at proton.me.

Speaker 15 Obviously, this is something we're going to continue taking an interest in.

Speaker 15 And obviously, it's something that we can't report the entirety of now because we're still waiting on the court case, but we are very interested in learning more about it.

Speaker 15 So please feel free to reach out. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 40 Yeah. Well, and it's something that Trump Trump is also saying they will be taking a continued interest in.

Speaker 40 He is promising that this is the first arrest of quote unquote many to come.

Speaker 40 So

Speaker 40 as they continue to focus on this, we will as well. James, did you have anything else you wanted to say, like re-lawyers?

Speaker 15 Yes. So as I mentioned before, right, people, people under the Biden administration have been moved away from their lawyers.
This is very common.

Speaker 15 It seems that now people are being moved away from their lawyers and having teleconference requests denied, i.e., let's say, Garrison, you're a lawyer and you have a client detained to San Diego, they're moved to Texas, and now you can't teleconference in for a 10-minute hearing.

Speaker 15 So, you would have to fly, right, for that 10-minute hearing.

Speaker 15 Yeah, which is going to make it impossible, both in time terms and financial terms. What I'm understanding, I'm still digging into this a little bit more, but that's what I'm hearing.

Speaker 15 So, this is going to be an ongoing thing.

Speaker 15 I guess if you're an immigration lawyer and one of the places people are being sent to, like Texas, you can help, but you probably already know that, and you're probably already doing that, and you're probably already very, very overworked if you work asylum cases.

Speaker 15 So, yeah, I think now is the time for groups like the ACLU to step up or shut up and we'll see. Well, the ACLU has come out against Mahmoud's arrest.
Okay, good. The ADL, obviously, totally for it.

Speaker 15 The ADL, an organization formed to help avoid another Holocaust, does not see any potential danger in a state redefining citizenship in order to disappear its political enemies.

Speaker 15 So we love the ADL here, folks. But the ACLU did, I mean, we'll see if they do anything, but they did like make a statement.
Yeah. And they've been very good.

Speaker 15 I should say the ACLU has been pursuing a lot of litigation against the Trump administration. This is the sort of thing they're pretty consistently anti, yes.
Yeah. Especially at a national level.

Speaker 15 They've been very good at this. And so,

Speaker 15 yeah, you know.

Speaker 15 Shout out to them, I guess. I don't know.
We don't need to shout it out. It's their job.
Yeah, they get millions of dollars to do this. Like, this is literally why you're there.
Do a good job or else.

Speaker 15 You'd better do something else, too. Like,

Speaker 15 yeah, yeah. You'd better show up, yeah.
I don't know. Don't donate to the ADL, I guess, if you were thinking of doing that after listening to this podcast.
Don't

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Speaker 25 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 26 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 28 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 29 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 32 We got clear facts. Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 34 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

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Speaker 15 Oh my god, you guys, it could happen here.

Speaker 15 Meaning, our podcast. It could.
It is. It's happened.
It did.

Speaker 40 Robert, shouldn't you rename the podcast It Is Happening Here?

Speaker 15 Yeah, uh-huh. That's that's a fun joke that I only hear 47 times a day.

Speaker 15 And the whole point of the podcast was, well, initially I was a crazy person saying a bunch of stuff would happen. And now it's a bunch of that stuff happened.
And

Speaker 15 even more of it looks very likely. And so now I just feel bad all the time.
It's going to be called, I fucking called it, I fucking told you, bro, I said this was going to happen.

Speaker 40 Why don't you rename the podcast? I just feel bad all the time.

Speaker 15 Yeah, why don't you rename the podcast, Robert Should Have Bought More Stock in Ammunition Companies than He Did? And DGI. Jesus should not have bought stock in DGI.
Yeah,

Speaker 15 I'm going to buy a little DGI drone here soon. Yeah, there we go.
A lot of people are going to be buying little DGI drones here very soon, James.

Speaker 15 I should point out that I'm buying one that's not capable of carrying a payload.

Speaker 40 It's definitely a safer investment to pull out your 401k now when the market's crashing. Use that money.
Buy drones. Those drones will be worth a lot more in five years.

Speaker 15 Or

Speaker 15 what is that? That is the sound of a sound investment. A box of bullets.

Speaker 40 It's like how boomers used to like invest in like silver or gold as like a stable currency, right? No, we're invested in DGI, like physical DGI drones.

Speaker 15 We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder. Yep.

Speaker 15 You got to get it in a bottle, Rubber.

Speaker 40 In a box, it can get light struck or get moist.

Speaker 15 You want to get it in a special black bottle. James, I keep all of my gunpowder.
And you know how people used to take cocaine by wrapping it in toilet paper and swallowing it?

Speaker 40 No, sure.

Speaker 15 Okay. Well, did you say so, buddy?

Speaker 15 Speaking of toilet paper, Nate Silver has a newsletter, and it would be useful as toilet paper more so than it is as a newsletter.

Speaker 40 Sorry, I just got like PTSD flashbacks from 2024 when you said that.

Speaker 15 It's okay. Normally, my rule of thumb is

Speaker 15 every election, usually starting in like December, the year before election year, I begrudgingly fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or four times in a bucket, and then head over to Nate Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls.

Speaker 15 And I do this. I hate that I keep having, I have regularly on election years, people were like, but he was always wrong.
He's like, no, he's reasonably good on polls.

Speaker 15 He's usually, if you read what he's saying about presidential polls, the reality bears out pretty close to that.

Speaker 15 So I read him during elections and I hate it because he's never been right about anything else, but he's he's a gambler. He's a very, he's a degenerate.
filthy gambler.

Speaker 15 And so when we're talking about degenerate, filthy gambler stuff, and by God, election polls are the most degenerate type of gambling that exists, he's worth reading.

Speaker 15 And then after the election, no matter how well or badly it goes, I ignore him again for four years.

Speaker 15 And I didn't get to do that this year because on February 25th, 2025, Nate wrote a column called Elon Musk and Spiky Intelligence.

Speaker 40 Spiky intelligence. Am I hearing that right?

Speaker 15 Spiky intelligence, yes. And it very helpfully starts with a drawing that I'm sure he used some AI,

Speaker 15 like he must have used some AI like video software to do that just like shows you a kind of spiky star looking thing and then like a blob with rounded edges.

Speaker 15 I can't begin to imagine why Nate Silver thought that, like, we needed this illustrated.

Speaker 40 I have to see this, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 15 I would like it to be shared. Look at this.
Why did you like

Speaker 15 promise of AI? We couldn't have

Speaker 15 a spiky idea.

Speaker 15 Yes, wow, yeah, it's just it looks like maybe an amoeba. If you, if you were it looks like an amoeba, and then like a poorly drawn star, isn't it? It's Boba and Kiki.
This is this is an actual thing.

Speaker 15 This is fifth you. Wait, this is a thing.

Speaker 40 This is this is Boba and Kiki with a a weird like digital fuzz uh over

Speaker 40 boba and kiki yeah okay garrison yeah it's a it's like a social experiment to like ask people what like the emotional correspondence of each of these shapes are like which it's a rorschack oh it's like a rorschack then sure or like like which one looks which one looks nicer which one looks meaner you know that sort of thing i'm a kiki type like like i i I am a Kiki

Speaker 40 in terms of my behavior.

Speaker 15 Garrison, now that you bring up Rorschach, all I can think of is how cool it would be if Rorschach from The Watchmen showed up in Nate Silver's house and did his thing.

Speaker 15 Unfortunately, I think Rorschach and Nate Silver might actually get fast friends.

Speaker 15 Actually, yeah. No, no, Nate would, but after them getting along for like 45 minutes, Nate would take him to an illegal card game and Rorschach would murder everybody in the room.

Speaker 15 Because they were gambling without a license.

Speaker 40 So I'm assuming Nate's going to try to argue that Musk's intelligence is akin to the Kiki drawing here, as opposed to like the empathetic boba, right?

Speaker 15 Actually, yes, there is a little bit of that in there. He does not mention this Kiki and Boba thing.
I don't know if that's because I'm supposed to just infer it from the image or if he's

Speaker 15 we'll get your opinion on it. Is he ripping these people off?

Speaker 15 Because this doesn't count as enough for him to be crediting them if this is the underpinning of his stupid idea, which he credits to his stupid book that he came up with later.

Speaker 15 But I'm just going to start reading the stupid column. Well, hit us with the second paragraph because that fucks up.
We haven't gotten paragraph one, Jake. Okay, that radicalized me immediately.

Speaker 15 There's been a debate raging on Twitter. Noah Smith can run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the platform's owner, Elon Musk.

Speaker 15 My contribution was to suggest, and then there's a little I in parentheses because we need that. Elon is obviously pretty bright, and then there's two I's in parentheses.

Speaker 15 This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment. Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things.
Okay.

Speaker 15 You'd think this wouldn't be especially controversial, but since it involves Elon and intelligence, well, it was.

Speaker 15 Elon has run founded or co-foundeds Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink, XAI, PayPal, and more recently, Twitter.

Speaker 15 He's also managed to steer himself into a position where he's now the de facto chief of staff to the President of the United States. I do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects.

Speaker 15 Some of these were long shot bets. In Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk documents, he thought he'd be ruined if it had been one more failed SpaceX launch.

Speaker 15 The success of some of these enterprises might also be debated. Yes.

Speaker 15 Twitter was a candy play for cultural and political influence, but it probably, and he doesn't bring up in this whole thing where he's talking about like all his successful companies, not a word about the boring company.

Speaker 15 Not a word about Hyperloop, right? Well, yeah, any of the failed ones. His record does seem better if you ignore the two massively publicized and invested absolute failures.

Speaker 41 Yes.

Speaker 40 Well, and last week, I know there was a SpaceX launch. I'm sure it went well.
I'm sure it didn't fling debris all over lower.

Speaker 15 I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial aircraft. Also, crediting it like, yeah, I guess technically co-founded OpenAI, but not in a way that mattered.

Speaker 15 He just shotgun money in there and then kind of edged out. Yeah.
Sure. Yes.
And is actively in a conflict with everybody who did make OpenAI as prominent as it is.

Speaker 15 Again, Natela has to leave a lot out in order to start making this case.

Speaker 40 But so he's going to argue that, you know, know, we're going to see how well this co-presidency goes, but he's probably a pretty smart guy to get all of this stuff done, right? Yeah.

Speaker 15 And he's also saying, well, like, maybe Twitter won't be profitable, but we'll see how, you know, he could probably profit from being the de facto chief of staff.

Speaker 15 Not a word from Nate about, like, yeah, but he's just like that just breaking the law. So

Speaker 15 why aren't we including in our canny businessmen guys that get rich selling like shitloads of heroin for the cartels?

Speaker 15 Because yes, if you are breaking the law, sometimes that goes well for you financially.

Speaker 40 Well, Walter White may have done some bad things. Yeah.

Speaker 15 But you can't deny he was a brilliant method cook, you know?

Speaker 15 But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is. 1400, according to Isaacson, he's clearly some sort of outlier in many ways people would associate with intelligence, probably even a genius.

Speaker 15 And yet, when my, and first off, It becomes clear through this that Nate does not consider a 1400 to be an impressive SAT score and would normally be be judgmental of someone who had an SAT score of 1400 if it weren't for all of Elon's other genius accomplishments.

Speaker 15 And yet, when my partner and I were heading to dinner the other day and we saw some tweet that Elon sent, I forget which one, because he tweets so much, we were both like, man, he's such a dumbass.

Speaker 15 Yes, someone can be both a genius and a dumbass. Welcome to what I call spiky intelligence.

Speaker 40 Here we go.

Speaker 15 This gets to like the core of what's annoying about Nate is his need to, he's one of these guys. You know what, you know what it is? He's He's an intellectual enclosurist, right?

Speaker 15 Where he's not confident to be like, everyone is very aware of the fact that no one is good at everything and that people have holes in their competence and that there are like brilliant surgeons who are bad fathers or whatever, because there are different kinds of intelligence.

Speaker 15 This is like a broadly common understanding.

Speaker 15 Nate has to give it a name so that he can sell his book. So he gives it the name.
It's like an intellectual. No, it's my idea.

Speaker 15 I'm the one who came up with the concept that smart people can be dumbasses. Stop it, mate.
It's annoying. Capital S, capital I, register trademark, spiky intelligence.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Now, he acknowledges that this isn't entirely

Speaker 15 original and then links to somebody without really like crediting them. Interestingly, many of the instances online refer to people on the autism spectrum.

Speaker 15 Musk has publicly stated that he has Asperger's syndrome, but the concept is simple.

Speaker 15 While intelligence is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, the scientific consensus is that there's also something known as a G-factor, factor, sometimes also called general intelligence.

Speaker 15 As an empirical matter, most traits we'd associate with intelligence are positively correlated.

Speaker 15 For instance, math and verbal skills in the GRE are correlated, but the correlations are loose enough that you'll wind up with all sorts of different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior.

Speaker 15 And he's just going into like, he talks about like the absent-minded professor.

Speaker 15 Like, it's all just these, these very common ideas that, like, yeah, people are usually bad at more things than they're good at, right? Like, it's, yeah, there's, there's no need to

Speaker 15 explain like

Speaker 15 how Elon Musk has been successful at certain things, but Nate does. And he has to keep going back to, like, he makes a comment later in here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer.

Speaker 15 He doesn't back this up with evidence.

Speaker 15 He just says that, like, well, if you read the book that Ashley Vance wrote, he obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves, which ignores the fact that like he's not making any of these decisions.

Speaker 15 Like he bought a company that already had good automotive technology. He hired a bunch of rocket engineers to design rockets.

Speaker 15 Elon is arguably good at hiring in certain circumstances, and he is inarguably a great hype man, right?

Speaker 15 Like, that's the actual brilliance that Elon has, is he was very, very good at hyping people up and getting people to believe in him until he was too big to fail.

Speaker 15 Like, that's the one thing he actually did.

Speaker 15 But Nate can't accept that because I think it kind of, among other things, it kind of reveals what Nate is, who is a guy who was really good at one narrow thing and now has a career writing about everything.

Speaker 15 And he can't, that's like a dangerous thing for Nate to think too hard about.

Speaker 40 Let's learn more about Nate's spiky intelligence after these very soft and soothing ads.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 We're back.

Speaker 15 I want to talk a little bit about the danger of being a guy who gets famous for being really good at one thing and then gets a job talking about everything, because I've had a version of that experience.

Speaker 15 And let me tell you, you're not ever going to be competent to discuss all of the things that you can make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer.

Speaker 15 No one ever has been, and no one ever will be, which is why what you ought to do is the thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on a bunch of people to like run a website with you, right?

Speaker 15 Where you cover more things than one. Unfortunately, it turns out 538 was a bad business venture.
It got massively overvalued.

Speaker 15 A company spent a shitload more money on it than it was capable of making. And now everyone's gotten laid off.
And Nate left years ago to do his sub stack.

Speaker 15 You know, it's a tragic case in the problem of like hubris and the fact that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't run an entire media enterprise.

Speaker 15 But Nate doesn't like thinking about that.

Speaker 15 It doesn't like thinking about the fact that maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at was being the guy from the music man, because I think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period of time.

Speaker 15 A lot of people clearly does. Yes.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 And there's been this thing lately where a lot of folks on the left have been like the, oh, you couldn't always tell that he was a con man. You couldn't always tell that he was this bad.

Speaker 15 Like he was always the worst.

Speaker 15 And I was like, no, like back in 2014, 15, when i was writing about the billionaires and rich people that were evil i was focusing on jamie dimon because he had helped create the 2008 financial collapse and he seemed he just seemed obviously much worse than this guy who up to that point was pretty much just making cars and rockets you know you have two companies doing that musk was not top of most people's radars for very good reason which gets to like There's this thing that's been created because of some of like the sinister beliefs that his grandfather had and his like family background, which has a lot of white supremacy in it, to that, that this has been Elon's sort of like grand plan from the beginning and that it's all come together for him, like as if he's he's, you know, a Marvel or a James Bond villain who's been executing this like 30-year plan to get where he is.

Speaker 15 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 15 I think when you look at his cognition. Like he's not the same man he was 10 years ago.
He's not the same guy he was when he started dating Grimes. And I'm not saying he was a good man before then.

Speaker 15 I don't think he particularly ever was, but he's clearly, his brain has degraded in part due to contact through Twitter.

Speaker 40 Well, yeah, and you can like measure this through his posting as well. Like,

Speaker 40 the types of posts he would make in 2017 are like completely opposite to the way that he would talk about certain social issues now. Oh, yeah.
He's not like memeing about like anarcho-syndicalism.

Speaker 40 Yeah.

Speaker 15 We get to a few of those things, but I want to read another quote from Nate's article because he's going to talk about his book On the Edge, which quote, describes a certain community of intelligent people that I call the river.

Speaker 15 These people who occupy a range of professions from AI research to poker to venture capital are bright, but in spiky ways.

Speaker 15 In Baron Cohen's dichotomy, they lean heavily towards the systematic side of the equation.

Speaker 15 They're good at abstract analytic reasoning, but they may lack other forms of intelligence like empathy, judgment, and self-awareness.

Speaker 15 They also have some distinctive characteristics largely unrelated to intelligence. For example, they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrarian.

Speaker 15 And again, what you are talking about, all of these people, number one, when he says AI research, he's not talking about people who are doing like the gut-level coding.

Speaker 15 He's talking about Sam Altman, right? Yeah, poker, venture capital. Uh, this is all gambling.
You're all talking about gamblers. The river is just gamblers, Nate.
It's people like you who

Speaker 15 put money on bets and they are contrarian and competitive because that's how gamblers are.

Speaker 15 That's the intelligent, that's the river.

Speaker 15 Like he's thinking about it as like this specific chunk of intellectuals who have, you know, there's some dangers, but they have great potential to make the world brilliant. Like, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 15 These are just people who like wind up shooting themselves outside of a sports betting facility. Like, that's the river, Nate.

Speaker 40 I have been turning into a monster during our friend poker nights recently. It's uh, it's tough.

Speaker 15 Garrison, by the way, I've been meaning to talk to you about wearing the full data makeup because you know your skin can't breathe if you coat your whole body.

Speaker 15 You're only supposed to put that on your face.

Speaker 40 I don't do that every time I play poker.

Speaker 15 You get a gold finger yourself, Garrison.

Speaker 40 I don't put on the data makeup every time I play poker, just that one time.

Speaker 40 Actually, no, I've done that twice now. Never mind.

Speaker 15 I have done that two times.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 15 It's becoming a habit.

Speaker 40 I also have the little hats. I ordered a 12-pack of the little poker visors to complete the outfit.

Speaker 15 Of course you did. Wonderful.
Of course you did. Yeah.
It would be rude not to. For better or worse.

Speaker 15 This typology, the river, is associated with high achievement in certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance. It is also associated with high variance.

Speaker 15 Sam Bankman-Freed built FTX into a company that investors valued at 32 billion before the House of Cards collapsed. Again, because he was a gambler.

Speaker 40 Because he was a COD man. Yeah.

Speaker 15 And again, Nate can't just accept, oh, he was never actually very smart.

Speaker 15 He just got really lucky for a while and then gave it up and then gambled it all away because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought.

Speaker 15 Nate says, I interviewed SBF several times for the book and I can tell you that he very much falls into the genius but dumbass category.

Speaker 15 How about just dumbass?

Speaker 15 Lucky dumbass. It's not hard.
What's the genius? Where did he prove that?

Speaker 40 I mean, he proved that by fooling Nate Silver, a man who probably values his own intelligence like a great deal.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing, right? Nate Silver can't admit, like, it would be ego death to admit that there are just some lucky, dumb white dudes. Yeah.

Speaker 15 If a guy had won, like, one of the lotteries where it was like a billion and a half dollars, right?

Speaker 15 Got crazy rich and then lost it all in two weeks because he just kept putting half a million dollars at a time on 21 black at a roulette table in Vegas.

Speaker 15 And I would be like, well, obviously he's a genius, but he's also kind of a dumbass. How else could he have made the money in the first place?

Speaker 15 I was like, no, he got lucky and then he gambled it all away because he doesn't have good judgment. Yeah.

Speaker 15 So it's important to avoid two pitfalls when encountering people with spiky intelligence. Namely, neither their worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story.
And I don't disagree with that.

Speaker 15 However, it's a meaningless statement because that's true of every human being ever born. Yeah.

Speaker 15 But clearly, Nate doesn't feel that way because only I think the undercurrent here is that only people like this in Nate's mind are worth talking about because only gamblers bring the world forward, right?

Speaker 15 Yeah, no one else deserves empathy. Yeah, yes.

Speaker 15 Like, you're just addicted to putting money on sports games and elections, Nate Silver. Anyway, so here's the two things he wants to warn us of or wants people to avoid.

Speaker 15 Elon is highly intelligent in several ways, but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant.

Speaker 15 Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and we shouldn't make excuses for them.

Speaker 15 But likewise, it's absurd to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just because he isn't in others. And if he has merely very good SAT SAT scores, I don't care.
Nobody does.

Speaker 15 It's not high school. Nobody cares about his SAT skills.

Speaker 40 Elon's, what, like, like 50, like 55 or something?

Speaker 15 Like, what are we doing? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
You are, you are a middle-aged man. I don't even know what my SAT score was.

Speaker 15 I was going to say, like, look, I never took an SAT, but I spent more than a decade in full-time education.

Speaker 15 And anyone who ever told me their SAT scores, I immediately hated and never took them seriously. I've spent almost 20 years asking people questions for a living and I've never asked anyone SAT school.

Speaker 15 Sorry, Garrison.

Speaker 40 Although SAT may not be like a stable metric for evaluating intelligence, surely Nate has an alternative method.

Speaker 15 Absolutely not, Garrison. Just how much well he does have a method.
He does have an alternative method. I'm seeing what you might call an infographic.

Speaker 15 Because the next section of the article is a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence. So.

Speaker 15 First, he admits he tried to track Elon down for his stupid book, but he couldn't get him to talk to him.

Speaker 15 I have to say, Elon does have better shit to do than talk to

Speaker 15 Nate Silver because Elon is abusing ketamine to a near fatal degree. And that is a better use of his time than talking to Nate Silver.

Speaker 15 So since he can't actually talk to Musk, he's going to model and extrapolate from, quote, many other Silicon Valley bigwigs I have met. Okay.
Helping him.

Speaker 15 And this is the fact that, quote, Musk maintains an extremely public profile. He's turned X into a running diary of his innermost thoughts.
And in addition to that, the biographies of the guy.

Speaker 15 One more caveat here. I will try to evaluate the overall trajectory of Elon's career, not just his recent antics.

Speaker 15 So we go down here, and the next segment is Dimensions where Musk has exceptionally high or genius-level intelligence. So finally, Nate's going to prove it.
And

Speaker 15 I'm going to show you guys

Speaker 15 how he chooses to do that.

Speaker 15 What the evidence he gives us here is.

Speaker 40 And I think this is something that we should reveal to the audience after these ads.

Speaker 15 Good point, Gare.

Speaker 15 All right, we're back. So let's look at what Nate shows as the chief dimension where Musk has shown high or genius level intelligence.

Speaker 15 Reading that first line, man.

Speaker 15 So the first words under this are cognitive load capacity and overall horsepower slash RAM. He's always on.
I mean, literally, look at how often he's tweeting.

Speaker 15 And then a huge graph that shows the density of tweets posted and when, which has been used by other people to prove that since sometime in late 2022, he's almost never gone more than about three hours without posting a tweet.

Speaker 15 Like, it's just a solid red after he buys the site. This like graph of like when he makes his posts.
He's never offline now. He's not sleeping.

Speaker 40 So this is a graph of Elon Musk's tweets from 2014 to 2024

Speaker 40 showing the time of day and when a post is posted represented by small red dots. And yes, at around 2022, the thickness of the red increases dramatically.

Speaker 15 It's almost just a straight red line.

Speaker 40 And like the period of where he must be sleeping in this

Speaker 40 graph is very concerning.

Speaker 15 No, he sometimes sleeps from about 6 to 9 a.m. as far as we can tell, but not regularly or often.
He has like a streak of 2023 where he just isn't sleeping. He's not sleeping.

Speaker 15 And again, he's on drugs, people. I think they're probably prescription.
I think I'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed.

Speaker 15 When you're this rich, you just get whatever drugs you want to do recreationally prescribed, right?

Speaker 15 But this is drug user behavior. I don't say that to judge drug users.
I say that as someone who had a drug problem. Like, this is drug user behavior.

Speaker 40 And specifically, Silver is using user.

Speaker 15 He's losing sobriety as possible. Sorry.

Speaker 40 And specifically, Silver is using this as an evidence of Musk's intelligence.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 41 It's not.

Speaker 40 He's scaling his Twitter activity as a sign that he must be like a special type of person.

Speaker 15 He's railing Adderall and eating ketamine lozenges all day, every day. That's what this is a sign of, and no one is allowed to take his phone away.
Anyway, here's how Nate explains why this is smart.

Speaker 15 In NBA terms, we say this is a player with an exceptionally high motor. And this is undoubtedly a valuable trade as the world becomes more complex.

Speaker 15 Last fall, I was simultaneously doing an extensive book media tour, running the election model, trying to build up Silver Bulletin, plus some intensive consulting work.

Speaker 15 Even if I mostly kept my wits about me, it was an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would only have been sustainable for a short burst.

Speaker 15 But Elon is taking on, I don't know, approximately a thousand times more stress than that and has done so for years. No, he's not.

Speaker 15 He just tweets.

Speaker 15 He has a massive number one, all of the businesses are being run by people who are specialists in those businesses.

Speaker 15 He gets called on to sit in meetings and say yes or no to stuff and occasionally tells them to do something crazy that causes issues, right? And they're not running smoothly.

Speaker 15 Tesla's lost more value now than it gained after the election.

Speaker 15 And SpaceX just had a giant rocket explode. Again, the boring company has not done anything other than make a useless hole underneath Vegas.
And the Hyperloop Hyperloop is nothing, right?

Speaker 15 Like, this, this, this is just

Speaker 15 full of shit, Nate.

Speaker 15 Like, what you have just described, running an election model that's functional, going on a book tour and consulting and writing a newsletter is more work than I credit Elon Musk with actually doing.

Speaker 15 Oh, yeah. More actual effort work.

Speaker 40 Musk is mostly like sitting in an occasional meeting, doing drugs and injecting random women with his sperm.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 40 And sending tweets.

Speaker 15 He doesn't do the injecting, I think. Oh, God.
Garrison, that comes up too. Oh, no.

Speaker 15 No. Oh, and it's crazy how it does.
Right before he posts the graph of how much Elon tweets.

Speaker 15 Okay, God, there it is. Okay.
Okay. Politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains.

Speaker 15 Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicating, especially if Musk ostracizes people who might keep him grounded.

Speaker 15 More sympathetically, he's taking on an incredible array of responsibilities, doing several really hard jobs at once, each of which would be stressful on their own, while still managing to father 13 children and tweeting hundreds of times per week.

Speaker 15 Again, equivalent efforts. Tweeting hundreds of times a week and fathering 13 children.
He's not a father to them. No, he just

Speaker 15 he contributed bio. He didn't even have sex.
Yeah. Yeah, it is literally the lowest possible effort way to have a child.

Speaker 41 We like.

Speaker 15 I'm going to guess most of the people with penises listening to this come. Like, that's not a big effort.

Speaker 15 You wouldn't include that as like what did i get done this week well in addition to working 40 hours i jacked off that's a little transphobic

Speaker 40 this is an hrt joke anyway continue

Speaker 15 i'm just saying it's that it doesn't count as work

Speaker 15 yeah certainly not from us unless you're a sex worker then it does okay like especially i know a lot of male porn stars

Speaker 15 That's that is a difficult part of the job. That's why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that kill their hearts.

Speaker 40 I would like to get into more of Silver's justification for

Speaker 40 why he associates this high tweet load with intelligence.

Speaker 15 Well, because it shows rapid cognition and thin slicing ability. Okay.

Speaker 15 All right.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Sure.
Sure, man. Indeed, in a capitalist system with a significant premium on being first to market, making decent judgments fast is often more important than making better judgments slowly.

Speaker 15 Canonically, VCs imagine themselves rapidly filtering through potential founders as though on Shark Tank, relying on well-owned gut instinct. But this also gets people in trouble, as it has for Elon.

Speaker 15 What is Shark Tank's success rate?

Speaker 15 Yeah,

Speaker 15 I bet there's a quick answer to that. Yeah.
And let's consider that it has built-in free television advertising for any product they're less than 50% of deals are successfully closed. My God.

Speaker 15 Yeah. So

Speaker 15 I died out.

Speaker 15 All this tweeting also shows abstract problem-solving capability. This is related to the idea of creativity, though in Musk's case, it seemingly doesn't manifest itself in artistic prowess.

Speaker 15 Seemingly, seemingly. You know what? I'll give it to Nate there.

Speaker 40 I'll give it to Nate.

Speaker 15 I don't disagree with you there. And then, of course, instrumental rationality.
Philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types of rationality.

Speaker 15 Instrumental rationality is aligning means with ends, basically figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want. For this category, I think you have to point towards the scoreboard.

Speaker 15 Musk has some unparalleled accomplishments and isn't about to let anybody stand in his way. It's also a category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an asshole, not one for nice guys.

Speaker 15 Now, and again, if Musk's actual goal is his stated goal, getting to Mars, then backing the political party that is actively doing as much damage to the biosphere as possible, ensuring that it will not have the carrying capacity necessary to make any kind of off-world civilization likely, I would argue, is a stupid decision.

Speaker 15 But he doesn't actually want us to get to Mars, right? He just wants to be in charge of everything.

Speaker 40 No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference. That's really all it is.
Yes.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Yes.
And he has been very successful at that. But again,

Speaker 15 it's the success of brute force.

Speaker 15 It's the same way as like if you hire a thousand people who are willing to like break the kneecaps of a guy who annoys you, like you could say, like, I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people who annoy me, but really, you just have a lot of dudes who can beat people up for you.

Speaker 15 Like, is that intelligence? Or did you just have enough money to hire thugs?

Speaker 40 Or are you just a mob boss?

Speaker 15 Right. Are you just a mob boss?

Speaker 15 And a mob boss, no one is allowed to attack because it's going to be domestic terror to fuck up a Tesla store soon, you know? Anyway.

Speaker 15 We need ghost dog.

Speaker 40 It's pretty, it's pretty upsetting because, you know, a few weeks ago, I was having a little bit of a resist live moment and I actually ashed my clove cigarette on a parked Tesla.

Speaker 40 Felt pretty cool about it. But now I guess I can't even do that.
It's too dangerous.

Speaker 40 No, you can't. I could face substantial charges.

Speaker 15 You might want to text resist to a certain five-digit number or something. That's probably the best way to solve this, Garrison.
I just text resist to every single person in my phone book every day.

Speaker 15 It takes about seven hours. I have fallen behind on work.

Speaker 15 But it's the only thing we can do to fight fascism.

Speaker 40 The quickest path to intelligence is having a horrible sleep deprivation and drug problem, apparently.

Speaker 40 Or at least that is how you show for it. It's funny because I saw Brian Johnson, the billionaire who's eating his son's blood, or now plasma.
Oh, yeah, the dead guy.

Speaker 40 Posted his own self-study on the damaging effects of sleep deprivation. And I'm pretty sure Musk retweeted it with an emoji or something.
Like, dude, dude, your brain is completely sued.

Speaker 15 No,

Speaker 15 you are fried. You are the most cooked a man has ever been.
It's an interesting study. Like, there is legitimately interesting things to look at in Elon Musk's brain.

Speaker 15 Well, yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data put together, like, exhaustively by researchers studying how not just sleep deprivation, but like wealth and power impact the brain.

Speaker 15 And like, all of it makes a strong case that Elon Musk at this point has done more damage to his brain than like a career, one of those career WWE wrestlers who like kills their whole family and then shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their brain later.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 40 Well, before we close, I do want to say before any psychologists or sociologists or like

Speaker 40 linguists get mad at me, yes, I know Boba and Kiki is

Speaker 40 a shape-language like correlation test.

Speaker 40 I myself, as well as Nate here, have kind of expanded its usage to like projecting even more like human or like emotional qualities onto these shapes or onto these specific words.

Speaker 40 So please, sociologists, leave me alone.

Speaker 40 Do not message me about Boba and Keith.

Speaker 15 Please send Garrison, your favorite French sociologist

Speaker 15 by direct message on X.com.

Speaker 15 I'm afraid it's already too late.

Speaker 40 I think I already hear like 12 different Redditors typing.

Speaker 40 But yes, I think Nate's just using that image there as like a metaphor to like show how aggressive or manipulative Musk's own intelligence is as symbolized by a Kiki as opposed to you know maybe like maybe like a Bill Gates which might be more of like a boba intelligence type okay a little softer a little bit more philanthropy you know

Speaker 15 I just got finished reading nothing but rationalist and Zizian literature for two straight weeks about a quarter of a million words by my last count Garrison I don't have it in me to do this again I'm going to get back to my Hitler books you know where things make sense, where the world is completely safe.

Speaker 15 Yep, I'm returning to writing about the Syrian Civil War, which is my comparative happy place. Ah, the Syrian Civil War.

Speaker 15 Yeah,

Speaker 15 it's a really great world. I do wonder if he's trying to avoid some kind of intellectual property thing by using that little filter that he used over the Boobanks.

Speaker 15 No, because it would be, it's actually not fair use now, as opposed to if he just mentioned that thing as saying,

Speaker 15 yeah, because he doesn't talk about them. Then it is fair use, right? And he could use like a little clip of it

Speaker 15 to illustrate the point. Yeah.
Like I did with Manu Chow. Anyway, this is all I want to say again about Nate Silver until 2028.

Speaker 15 And if, you know what, the upside if democracy really does die is we'll never have to talk about him again.

Speaker 40 If Trump and Musk really take over fully and do a full coup, we never have to talk about Nate Silver.

Speaker 15 In nine minutes from now, I'm wearing a Curtis Yarvin t-shirt.

Speaker 15 No, but they'll be doing the sad numbers and he will still be analyzing that data. Like

Speaker 15 straight regime capture of Nate Silver. Well, it doesn't seem possible that Trump could have gotten 104% of the vote, but those are spiky percentages.
Those are spiky percentages.

Speaker 40 Why can't Nate Silver just like run like Trump's casino or something, right? This is just like, just like

Speaker 40 put him away.

Speaker 15 I understand if Nate, because Nate's rich, he doesn't need to do the other stuff. And if he was like just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, oh, yeah, that's what he loves, right?

Speaker 15 If I had Nate Silver money, I'd probably just write novels for the rest of my life because that's what I like to do. I don't understand why he keeps writing about politics.

Speaker 15 He's not good at it and he can't like it. He needs to feel special.
He wants to feel like a special boy who knows the answers that no one else does. All right.

Speaker 15 Well, anyway, this is us making fun of Nate Silver. So you don't, well, you can still make fun of him, but you don't have to read him.
We did that for you. Good night.

Speaker 4 This is Matt Rogers from Los Culturas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 5 This is Bowen Yang from Los Cultures with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

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Speaker 25 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 26 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 28 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 29 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 32 We got clear facts. Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 34 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 35 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 36 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 37 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 40 This is it could happen here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of the world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis.

Speaker 40 Today I'm joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of March 5 to March 12th.
Trump films a Tesla commercial, RFK Jr.

Speaker 40 eats beef tallow French fries at Steak and Shake, And Sam Cedar commits a mass casualty event on YouTube. How is everyone doing today?

Speaker 15 Very happy to join you for ED this week. Huge fan of ED.
Just like, just big, big ED guy. So, you know, psyched to be here.
I feel like we should mention up top.

Speaker 15 There's also a bunch of unhinged terrorist news and the most like electing fucking Caligula's horse to the Senate thing I've seen in a long time. So stay tuned for that.
Lots of good stuff.

Speaker 40 Yes, we will get to it.

Speaker 40 First, I would like to give a little bit of an update on a story that we talked about a few days ago, the detention and the revocation of a green card for a Palestinian activist, Mahmoud Khalil.

Speaker 40 As of Wednesday, his lawyers have still been unable to even contact their client. There was a large rally outside the first court conference in New York this Wednesday.

Speaker 40 So we talked about this a few days ago for some background, an episode with James, Robert, and myself.

Speaker 15 robert do you want to like briefly summarize the the situation and then i'll play a clip from one of his lawyers the situation is that this guy got taken into custody my understanding is it was at an apartment that he lived in with his wife he was a u.s citizen He became aware, it looks like at least about 24 hours before, probably became aware that he was being, it's a little clear if he was just like being surveilled or there was something else that tipped them off, but he contacted the school asking for help, convinced that ICE was coming for him about a day before they did.

Speaker 15 When they entered the house, my understanding is based on the claims being made by his wife, that they did not like, they didn't like produce a warrant or anything.

Speaker 40 He's still not charged with any crime.

Speaker 15 No, he's not been charged with any crime. And they just took him and like turned off the phone when they were on the phone to their lawyers, if I'm remembering correctly.
Correct.

Speaker 15 So it's like, none of this is the way this should have gone. Like, if this was an arrest.

Speaker 40 No, he was just like blackbagged from campus. Yeah.

Speaker 15 but it's not an arrest again and they've been very clear about this that like they have specifically stated we're not accusing him of like breaking the law right like that's that's not what's going on here correct and we will get to some of that later i'm going to play a clip from a press conference outside court that happened on wednesday march 12th this is one of his lawyers mr khalil's detention has nothing to do with security it is only about repression

Speaker 43 the united states government has taken the position that it can arrest, detain, and seek to deport a lawful permanent resident exclusively because of his peaceful, constitutionally protected activism.

Speaker 43 In this case, activism in support of Palestinian human rights and an end to the genocide in Gaza.

Speaker 43 The government takes the position that because the Secretary of State finds his dissent

Speaker 43 unacceptable or contrary to U.S. foreign policy, he can be deported.
As Ramsey suggested, it's largely unprecedented save for ugly historical precedents, including in the Red Scare and McCarthyism.

Speaker 43 That's what we're talking about.

Speaker 43 We're also talking about a period of repression that the Center for Constitutional Rights knows well following 9-11 when we were in the courts trying to get people out of secret detention.

Speaker 43 One thing that's different now is the legal infrastructure is so much stronger, and everyone out here on the streets knows that we cannot hide in the face of this amount of repression.

Speaker 43 We will be fighting in the courts and fighting in the streets to bring Mahmoud home and prevent this level of repression from spreading

Speaker 43 to many others as the administration has threatened to do.

Speaker 40 So that was on Wednesday. For now, Khalil will be remaining in ICE detention in Louisiana.
And ICE director Tom Homan said Wednesday that, quote, free speech has its limitations, unquote.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 I have found some stuff today of people on the right attacking the judge who put out a, I guess called a stay on this, in part because because the judge is Jewish.

Speaker 15 So it's nice to see the anti-Semitism being used

Speaker 15 in that way as well in this instance.

Speaker 15 Just fascinating. We're really breaking new ground in all of this.

Speaker 40 A White House official did tell Friend of the Pod, the free press,

Speaker 40 not necessarily our favorite publication, but they do have an exclusive quote here, that the basis for targeting Khalil is being used as a blueprint for investigations against other students, saying Khalil is, quote, a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States, unquote, said the official, noting that this calculation was the driving force behind the arrest, saying, quote, the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law.

Speaker 40 So we have this official like open, openly saying, like, he's not charged with a crime. We're just wanting to see if we can do this.

Speaker 40 Can we deport a legal permanent resident for saying something that we don't like?

Speaker 15 Yeah, and I think that there's been a lot of comparisons to this to direct McCarthyism. I think that's accurate to some extent.
I think the most direct comparison to this is not McCarthyism.

Speaker 15 It's the Palmer Raids,

Speaker 15 which I think people tend to be way less familiar with. That was the first Red Scare, which was largely targeted at the industrial workers of the world for their opposition to World War I.

Speaker 15 And they did basically the same shit. A lot of people would give anti-war speeches, and then a whole bunch of IWW organizers and other sort of like leftists would get fucking deported for it.

Speaker 15 So, yeah, that was an absolutely terrifying period of repression.

Speaker 15 If the line is not drawn here, and it should have been drawn like 200 miles back from here, but if it isn't drawn here, this this is going to continue. This is going to continue to get worse.

Speaker 40 And I mean, all this is, all this is in relation to Trump's executive order, you know, about quote-unquote anti-Semitism.

Speaker 40 Meanwhile, today in the Oval Office, he said something incredibly anti-Semitic and also anti-Arab somehow, in like in the same statement, saying,

Speaker 40 Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I'm concerned. He's become a Palestinian.
He used to be Jewish. He's not Jewish anymore.
He's a Palestinian, unquote.

Speaker 40 Which is just an unbelievably unbelievably anti-Semitic and anti-Arab statement all at once, like removing someone's Jewishness because of how they act or things they've said or things they believe in.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And it's one of those things, again, like it's worth like covering this as it develops.

Speaker 15 There's not much to say other than like this is incredibly illegal and has to be opposed immediately and vigorously. Like, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 40 No, it's really bad. And of course, you're not going to have the ADL coming out against Trump here.

Speaker 15 The ACLU did,

Speaker 15 which I I should note, because I heard some people saying they did not expect the ACLU to. They have.
But yeah, the ADL is fully in the camp of lock anyone up who's ever protested Israel.

Speaker 40 And they're not going to call Trump anti-Semitic for making a statement like this

Speaker 40 because their interests are fairly aligned at this point. Re, what's happening in Gaza.

Speaker 40 I think now we're going to play a special report from James, who can't be on the recording here today, but he does have a report on deportations in Panama. So, James, take it away.

Speaker 15 So, something that we've seen in the last week is that the people who the U.S.

Speaker 15 government has deported to Panama, who it can't deport to their home countries, have in some cases been released by the Panamanian government and given a 30-day visa or 30 days to essentially exit Panama.

Speaker 15 And they're not really being given any support. So, they're in some cases like just sleeping on the streets in Panama City, right?

Speaker 15 Just wandering around, trying to work out how to get home and trying to work out like what they they should do next. Obviously, these are people who have fled places like Afghanistan, Iran, right?

Speaker 15 Places where they can't go back to.

Speaker 15 They would face persecution just for the act of having tried to leave, even if they weren't already facing persecution before, which many of them were, that that's why they fled.

Speaker 15 So they've just kind of kicked it down the road a little bit. And we'll see where this leads.

Speaker 15 But it's another piece of evidence that this wasn't hugely well planned, that the Trump administration just wanted to get these deportation numbers up at almost any cost.

Speaker 40 All right. We're going to go on a break and come back to talk about the Department of Education and tariff talk with Mia Wong.

Speaker 15 Wow. Well, we are back and, you know, it's everyone's favorite time of the podcast talking about tariffs.

Speaker 15 And before we get to Mia, I want to bring on a musical guest to set this section of the program up.

Speaker 15 Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh.
That was worth the rest of our year's budget. Now, everyone will be getting paid for the rest of the year in Denny's coupons.

Speaker 15 That's all we have left after paying for this, but I think we can all agree, worth it.

Speaker 40 Do you want to explain what that is? Because I still don't really have a clue what exactly that opening theme song is for Tariff Talk.

Speaker 15 Well, there was a great band called The Clash once, and they wrote one song that wasn't very good. And in it, somebody says something that didn't sound very much like the word tariff.

Speaker 15 But if you mispronounce the word tariff, it fit in. And that's where $42,000 of our operating budget this year went.
Anyway, Mia, let's talk about tariffs. Yeah,

Speaker 15 now that I've gotten one of the two things I've ever wanted in life, play on music. So

Speaker 15 since last week, this has been an entire roller coaster because right after we finished recording in like the next two days, everyone went, oh, the tariffs aren't going to be that bad because a lot of the tariffs that were hit with Trump's sort of general 25% Canada-Mexico tariff got waived after Trump agreed not to apply them to goods covered by the USMCA free trade agreement.

Speaker 15 But then everyone remembered that the 25% steel and aluminum tariff was still going into effect. And so that went into effect this week.

Speaker 15 Now, there was also a brief, incredible moment of panic where Trump was talking about doubling them to 50%.

Speaker 15 He backs off of this in exchange for Ontario's Doug Ford stopping a like 25% increase in electricity prices. However, Kamba, the trade war is 100%

Speaker 15 still on. Canada is doing a whole like sort of slate of reciprocal tariffs, specifically on steel and also tariffs and taxes on a whole suite of other U.S.
goods.

Speaker 15 I'm just going to read this from the Associated Press because this is no longer, the trade war here is no longer limited to the U.S., Canada, China, and to some extent, Mexico, although Mexico really hasn't been responding in the same way as basically every other country who's come under these tariffs, or at least the sort of main focuses of these tariffs.

Speaker 15 But this week, the EU officially joined the phrase. So here's from the AP, quote, across the Atlantic, the European Union will raise tariffs on American beef, poultry, bourbon, and motorcycles.

Speaker 15 Bourbon again?

Speaker 15 Yeah, yeah, bourbon twice. Yeah, bourbon twice.
It's twice as important as the other thing. Yes, peanut butter and jeans.
Actually, you say this. There was a whole, like, part of the whole speech.

Speaker 15 That was not a joke, Mia.

Speaker 15 People from the EU, like this, this was part of the thing was, yeah, like, we're hoping to restore the profitability of the American spirits markets when the U.S. backs down.

Speaker 40 It was also the only American product that Trudeau could name during his big speech.

Speaker 15 Very funny.

Speaker 15 Let's be honest. Outside of music, this nation has produced one thing of value to the world, and it's bourbon.

Speaker 15 Pretty reasonable. It's also very funny that it was like, bourbon was like our, what attempt number was it at making whiskey before we finally got one that was like

Speaker 15 exportable? Terrible.

Speaker 15 I mean, yeah, it took generations. Look, you know,

Speaker 15 Rome wasn't built in today, and bourbon is the Rome of liquors produced in Kentucky.

Speaker 15 Yeah, well, and speaking of it being produced in Kentucky, this is actually deliberately, okay, well, all right, so the EU in theory, the line that they're saying is that these are deliberately designed to like target things that are made in red states.

Speaker 15 They also did do soybean tariffs too, though, which is, you know, like you're dropping a nuke on Illinois here. Okay, so the EU has imposed reciprocal tariffs on $28 billion of U.S.
goods.

Speaker 15 Also, on Tuesday, China's tariffs went into effect, which means the agricultural tariffs that we talked about last week, and notably I keep coming back to soybeans because soybeans are such a critical part of the system of American agriculture as the crop that you rotate out with corn to sort of like preserve soil integrity.

Speaker 15 The Chinese tariffs are now in effect. It's mostly on agricultural goods.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and this has, I think, in ways that are pretty predictable, at least to me, this has caused a lot of panic in the markets. There's been some sort of rallying as like more information comes in.

Speaker 15 But there's stuff that I did not predict, which is, so, okay, Goldman Sachs has downgraded its projection for US GDP growth.

Speaker 15 Their chief economist is talking about how he thinks we're going to get stagflation again, which is sort of while stagflation was the thing in the 70s that was, you know, like you have inflation and unemployment growth at the same time.

Speaker 15 This is basically the economic condition that liquidated the welfare state and allowed Durrite to take power in the first place.

Speaker 40 That's funny because when I Google stagflation, I get very different results.

Speaker 40 That could just be my own.

Speaker 15 No, no, that's that's that's stagflation, Garrison. Two very different things.

Speaker 40 Oh, sorry. Yeah, I think I missed it.

Speaker 15 So anyway, yeah, me.

Speaker 15 The things I have to deal with on this job. They never didn't warn me.
Every single day, you got your music now.

Speaker 15 It's true. It's true.
It's true. This makes up for a lot.
If you ever get to fight The Undertaker, you have a song to go on to. It's true.

Speaker 15 So. Okay, now sort of more surprisingly, and this is something I have literally never seen before with the US.

Speaker 15 Both Citibank, well, Citi, which is the over, Citibank like changed its name to Citi or something, but Citibank and UBS, the giant Swiss bank, downgraded the status of all U.S. equities.

Speaker 15 I have never seen anything like this in my entire life. They are also boosting the status of Chinese and EU equity.
So this is basically like, this doesn't have like a technical official effect.

Speaker 15 But this is like, this is basically their, their evaluation of what countries like stocks basically you should purchase right and this is also sort of applies to bonds so is that bad this is

Speaker 15 like I assumed that the US would get its actual credit rating devalued before this happens I've never this is this is unreal like the the argument that they are making here is that it is because of the instability in the US like because because of the tariffs and because of everything that's going on that like you should just fucking pull your money out of the out of the US and American companies and put it somewhere else and they're they're specifically boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities, which is astonishing.

Speaker 15 Because again,

Speaker 15 one of the countries, again, whose equity status that they are boosting is China. China's economy is a fucking disaster right now.
They're dealing with their fucking housing bubble going under.

Speaker 15 They've been trying to do this pivot to a consumer-based economy for years and years and years and years, and it doesn't work because they don't pay people enough to actually fuel an economy by consumer spending.

Speaker 15 They're about to take giant damage from the trade war.

Speaker 15 And also that, like, you know, like, it was only like three years ago the CCP faced their first like nationwide mass protests, like, since Tiananmen, right?

Speaker 15 And these guys, like, and again, these are, these, these are the financial analysts of Citibank and UBS have looked at that and went, you are better off putting your money there than you are putting it in the U.S.

Speaker 40 I mean, at this point, I think Trump's tariffs have wiped out. I'm reading $4 trillion from the U.S.
stock market just in this past month.

Speaker 15 Now, trillion, is that...

Speaker 15 Okay, so for example, I have $32

Speaker 15 right now in my pocket. Is it more than that?

Speaker 40 I think it's a little bit more.

Speaker 15 Okay, okay, okay. So, it is enough to buy two different servings of

Speaker 15 pizza. Okay.
This is, I'm trying to put this into terms I can understand. Thank you.
It is.

Speaker 15 Imagine one burger, right? And a burger in Portland does cost $32. So, yes.
Yes. Now, now imagine, I thought you were going to say,

Speaker 40 I think it's cost $4 trillion.

Speaker 15 I mean, probably tomorrow, right? Like, two knows? I don't know. If, if

Speaker 15 the fucking plagues that we're doing.

Speaker 15 Adding levity, because this is legitimately kind of frightening. No, like, this is, I have never seen the financial press like this.

Speaker 15 Like, the only times I've ever seen the financial press react to something like this is, like...

Speaker 15 They were kind of acting like this about the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn like taking power in the UK. Like, they are, like, I watched a guy on CNBC, right?

Speaker 15 This is not, like, like, this is, this is not MSNBC. This is not even like CNN.
This is CNBC.

Speaker 15 Literally go on air and call what Trump is doing, quote, insane, and start talking about how, and this is something, and this is, I think, what these people are worried about is they're, you know, the thing that they're seeing that's starting right now, and it's starting with these sort of, with these downgrades of U.S.

Speaker 15 equities, is capital flight, which is straight up a butt, like international capital taking their money from the US and fucking literally moving out of the country and moving it somewhere else because the U.S.

Speaker 15 is so unstable. This is,

Speaker 15 I don't know if anyone knows what mass capital flight from the U.S. would do because I've never seen anything like this.
So part of what's going on, right?

Speaker 15 And part of the reason the markets have kind of recovered in the last few days after the tanking they did Monday is that like the inflation data came out and it wasn't that bad.

Speaker 15 But the thing is, all of the inflation data we're getting right now and all of the economic indicators we're getting right now,

Speaker 15 it's going to take a little bit of time for the actual effects of these tariffs to set in. Right.

Speaker 15 Like these are, these are things that like, you know, it's going to take, it's going to take like six months, maybe a year before we fully see the impacts of that and but and when we do it is going to fucking blow a smoking creator into the economy and the worst part of this about this is this isn't even the most unhinged part of this the most unhinged part of this is how the republicans have been reacting to all of this in congress so one of the few things the democrats have been trying to do and i say one of the few because like their response has been downright collaborationist but they've been trying to force republicans to take a vote on the tariffs because the tariffs are unbelievably unpopular

Speaker 15 and they're particularly unbelievably unpopular among like the capital owning class who you know actually matter so what they've been trying to do is that trump did these tariffs by declaring a state of emergency and the democrats wanted to use the national emergencies act to force a vote on the tariffs i'm just going to read this in the new york times the national emergency law lays out a fast-track process for congress to consider a resolution ending a presidential emergency requiring committee consideration within 15 calendar days after one is introduced and a floor vote within three days after that.

Speaker 15 But the language the House Republicans inserted into their measure on Tuesday declared that, quote, each day for the remainder of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for the purposes of the emergency that Trump declared on February 1st.

Speaker 15 So the point we are at right now is in order to preserve a bunch of tariffs which are effectively about to fucking obliterate the entire world economy, Congress has declared that days don't pass.

Speaker 15 This is fucking, this is completely unhinged. This is fucking like Caligula's horse in the Senate shit.

Speaker 15 Like they, again, they are literally, they have literally declared that calendar days passing are not actually calendar days so that Trump can just keep doing tariff shit and rule by fiat.

Speaker 40 Like the Israelites, they have stopped time in order to win the battle.

Speaker 15 It's it's genuinely astonishing. And the extent to which this has kind of just been swept under the rug, the Republicans have been doing this kind of quietly, right? And

Speaker 15 the fact that, like, the fact that Democrats are not literally on TV every single second of every day going, the Republicans are voting to stop time so that Trump can destroy the economy is astonishing.

Speaker 15 It's this real like sort of admission by the Republican Congress that like they're ceding authority over policy like to Trump completely, right?

Speaker 15 Like the government now is Trump ruling by sort of fiat and people attempting to sort of like run circles around him in courts, which is not, you know, working enormously well.

Speaker 40 Yeah, we'll see.

Speaker 15 And, you know, and this, this, this is starting to have effects on, like, investor confidence, like, in, in the, in like the U.S. as a political entity and the U.S.

Speaker 15 as an economic entity, which is unprecedented.

Speaker 15 The other thing I think it's worth noting is that these people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the people around them have been saying for a long time that the plan is to cause a recession and that after the recession, things are going to get better.

Speaker 15 And the financial press just hasn't believed them. And

Speaker 15 this

Speaker 15 right now is the period in which they're starting to realize that they were serious about this.

Speaker 15 And I don't know what the political ramifications of that are going to be because these are people who actually matter in the political system.

Speaker 15 And I think we'll see the ramifications of this play out in the sort of coming weeks and months. But this is a fucking cliff that we've hit.

Speaker 15 And we're now like wily coyote, like running off the side and trying not to look down. But on the upside, we have a great new song for everybody.
So,

Speaker 15 who's to say if any of this has been bad?

Speaker 40 All right, we are back.

Speaker 40 Speaking of running circles around the courts, we do have a small update, re-USAID. Usaid.

Speaker 40 Last week, in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court denied an appeal from the Trump administration in a case regarding Trump's attempted federal funds freeze and the shuttering of USAID.

Speaker 40 This was a case filed by the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council.

Speaker 40 The White House is now required to pay foreign aid contractors for work that has already been completed, and further details will be worked out back in the district court.

Speaker 40 And it's still unclear, you know, if the Trump administration is going to abide by the court's ruling and resume all required payments.

Speaker 40 But this is the first move from the Supreme Court regarding Trump's actions the past few months.

Speaker 40 This has also not stopped Trump from trying to slowly close other entire government agencies. This very week, the Education Department laid off nearly half of its workforce, over 1,300 employees.

Speaker 40 Late Tuesday night, Education Secretary Linda McMahon went on to Fox News to say that this reduction force is only the first step towards abolishing the entire Education Department, saying, quote, this was the president's mandate.

Speaker 15 His directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know will have to work with congress you know to get that accomplished but what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what i think is bureaucratic bloat unquote yeah and i mean like you know we've talked about on this show for a long time how eliminating department of education eventually destroying public education has been a long-running goal oh yeah of the most absolutely unhinged of these people who are the people now in charge and yeah they've decided to just like individually fuck every child in the u.s it's incredible.

Speaker 40 Well, and so far, the way that they're trying to close up the Department of Education is kind of in a more selective manner because they're still keeping certain parts of the department active.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 40 On March 10th, the Education Department announced that they were launching investigations into 60 universities for quote, Title VI violations relating to anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination, unquote.

Speaker 40 And this is in relation to anti-genocide protests on campus. And this comes after Trump announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University.

Speaker 40 The Education Department is threatening that these other 59 universities may lose their funding if they do not, quote, enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin.

Speaker 40 National origin includes shared Jewish ancestry. Unquote.

Speaker 40 I don't know what to say here.

Speaker 15 You get to see all the threads of this admin coming together, right?

Speaker 15 Which is that, you know, these people are also attempting to effectively destroy like the secondary education system in this country, too, for reasons that are sort of unclear to me. I don't know.

Speaker 15 But what we're seeing here, right, is the ways that the Democrats sort of like falling into locks up with the Republicans on backing the genocide in Israel has sort of led to this thing where the Republicans are using this to just straight up obliterate like all of the U.S.'s like

Speaker 40 political, economic, and social institutions. Well, and specifically with this like investigation,

Speaker 40 they are trying to get all these universities to cooperate in efforts to selectively remove students who have protested against the genocide in Gaza, right? This is

Speaker 40 the same attack on free speech and free expression that they're doing against Khalil.

Speaker 40 This is the same exact purpose.

Speaker 40 And now they're trying to get more and more universities to be complicit in the selective removal of people in this country who choose to express their First Amendment rights, regardless of whether they're a citizen or green card holder or on a student visa.

Speaker 40 So this is all deeply, deeply worrying. Robert, you have a small segment you want to discuss before we start to close out.

Speaker 15 Yeah,

Speaker 15 just a little bit at the end here. So in the subreddit for the 50501 protest campaign, which is

Speaker 15 an attempt to do protests in all 50 states simultaneously, right? I think their next day of action is coming up in April.

Speaker 15 I'm not giving an opinion on the overall thing, but in the subreddit, somebody posted claiming to be a National Guard soldier, giving kind of his thoughts on how the National Guard would respond to orders to carry out violence against U.S.

Speaker 15 citizens. And I just wanted to chat about this both because it's something we talk about on the show pretty regularly.

Speaker 15 My opinion is that one of the likely ways things come to a head, probably as early as this summer, summer, is that there is mass protests in D.C.

Speaker 15 and the Insurrection Act gets used and the guard at least are brought in to attempt to crack down.

Speaker 15 I mean, obviously, Trump has done a version of this before, and Trump and his state attorney have both discussed using the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests. I think they see D.C.

Speaker 15 as the place they want to do that. So it's interesting to me to see a post like this.
This is not a thing where like I've been able to verify this guy yet.

Speaker 15 There's a couple of points that make me think this probably is a National Guardsman. For one thing, there's a lot of them, right? Like, this is not like a National Guardsman.
Where did you find one?

Speaker 15 There's a ton of fucking dudes in the National Guard.

Speaker 15 For the other thing, everything he says is consistent with things that I have seen and talked to other people who were in and were in the Guard about.

Speaker 15 There's one little bit where he advises people on, like, stop the bleed gear, and he gives good advice. He says, only buy from NAR and North American Rescue.
It's the same advice we would have given.

Speaker 15 He cites DOD Directive 134410, which is why he believes he's well within his rights to make a post like this.

Speaker 15 And in essence, what he's saying is that it is his belief that most of the military chain of command from NCOs up to officers would not be down with following illegal orders to fire on U.S. citizens.

Speaker 15 But the vast majority of enlisted troops, if fired upon,

Speaker 15 would get over whatever issues they have with that very quickly, right?

Speaker 15 That's the gist of it is that I think, you know, within sort of the officer class and the NCO class, there are a lot of resistance to the idea of the military being used for domestic policing.

Speaker 15 That is less clear with kind of the enlisted class who are, you know, a significant chunk of them are very much down for Trump.

Speaker 15 But whatever sort of divisions exist within enlisted soldiers would fall apart pretty quickly if soldiers were fired upon. And I think this is probably like a assuming this is accurate.

Speaker 15 And I don't really see a reason to doubt it. There's nothing he's saying here that's crazy.

Speaker 15 I think this is kind of an interesting thing to keep in mind that like when you're looking at the military, it's not the police.

Speaker 15 Like if I have to have agents, armed agents of the state cracking down on a protest, I'm less worried about people being killed if it's the National Guard in general.

Speaker 15 But that situation can change very, very rapidly if.

Speaker 15 like the situation becomes an active firefight. And I do think like that's a thing we have to consider right now is the possibility that we have U.S.

Speaker 15 soldiers, whether the National Guard or active duty, engaged openly in shooting at American protesters. Like that's that's in the cards as early as this summer.

Speaker 15 And it's not a fun thing to think about, but I'm seeing more and more,

Speaker 15 not just posts like this, but I'm having more and more conversations with people.

Speaker 15 who are in the military or who were in the are in the National Guard about their concerns about what they might be called upon to do.

Speaker 15 Some of this has to do with the border, but like it is becoming increasingly common for people in the military to worry about how they are going to be used in the immediate future.

Speaker 15 We're not talking about years. We're talking about this summer, right? Is when there's a very good chance a lot of stuff comes to a head.
So these are...

Speaker 15 things you should be thinking about if you're listening and you are in the military.

Speaker 15 These are things that you should be thinking about because the people who are in charge of our government right now have made a lot of statements about how they want to use the military to deal with protests.

Speaker 15 And the idea that that's going to happen very soon is not fringe or crazy.

Speaker 40 Well, and although these people might have, you know, slightly more discipline when it comes to actual firearms, there is also incidents like in 2020 where the Kentucky Army National Guard killed someone via the misuse of crowd control

Speaker 40 munitions.

Speaker 40 I think that this is also worth stating, even if, you know, like a Kent state situation maybe is not as likely in like the modern day, there's certainly other ways to cause grievous harm in these sorts of like protest environments.

Speaker 15 And when we've seen, I mean, even in Portland, when we have seen what you witnessed personally, unfortunately, Garrison, the worst injuries to crowd control devices are usually people, in our case, it was federal agents, but who are utilizing crowd control weapons and have not trained on them because they're not, there's certain ways you're supposed to and not supposed to use them.

Speaker 15 And these guys are just, hey, you know how to use a gun.

Speaker 40 You must know how to use the rubber bullet thing, you know?

Speaker 40 No, if you use use like less lethals the way you would use, you know, a regular firearm, that actually leads to like much more like possible lethal consequences or like life-changing consequences.

Speaker 40 Yeah. Which, you know, police are more familiar with the regular use of crowd control munitions than necessarily, you know, like Boratak or like State National Guards.

Speaker 40 Something that's also, you know, worth keeping in mind.

Speaker 40 Let's close by my least favorite segment, Stinky Musk, which still has a really bad name.

Speaker 40 On Monday, a central judge ruled that Musk's Doge should be subject to comply with FOIA requests and public disclosures of information required of government agencies, with the judge ordering the release of email correspondence between Musk's team and the Office of Management and Budget, and was ordered to, quote, begin producing documents on a rolling basis as soon as practicable, unquote.

Speaker 40 Now, despite Musk's claims of quote-unquote maximum transparency, last month the Trump administration tried to shield Doge from public records requests by labeling the agency's documents as quote-unquote presidential records, which carries special protections.

Speaker 40 This specific case is super interesting.

Speaker 40 The judge, a federal judge by the name of Cooper, also critiqued the way that the Trump admin tried to litigate this case, quoting from Politico, quote, The lawyers offered virtually nothing in the way of evidence about Doge's operations or management.

Speaker 40 Indeed, the court wonders whether this decision was strategic, Cooper said, noting that the Trump administration lawyers had taken competing positions, including that Doge qualifies as an agency under some sections of law, but not others when it suits it.

Speaker 40 Thus, Doge becomes, on the defendant's view, a Goldilocks entity, Cooper wrote. Not an agency when it's burdensome, but an agency when it's convenient.
Unquote.

Speaker 40 And I do like Cooper's analysis here of how Doge is very selectively an agency only when it causes benefit to Trump or Musk.

Speaker 40 And finally, we have one other Musk story to close out this episode.

Speaker 40 Amidst Tesla's plummeting stock price, protests outside Tesla dealerships, and reports of vandalism of dealerships across the country, Trump has essentially started doing ads for Tesla on the White House driveway.

Speaker 40 Upon climbing in a red car that he's not allowed to operate, Trump remarked, wow, everything is computer.

Speaker 40 So this was a very, a very odd and kind of embarrassing show of favoritism where Musk brought out like a number of different Tesla models and Trump got to quote unquote, you know, pick the one that he wanted to buy as he just like sat in on this like televised advertisement for Tesla as his company is

Speaker 40 losing a shocking amount of money in the in the stock market.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and there's, I mean, there's literally, there's literally a picture of him with like the notes that he has. There's like in a bunch in like really, really g-sales notes.

Speaker 40 It's like a bullet point of like how much certain models are, what their different features are, which ones have self-driving features included, which ones you have to pay extra for.

Speaker 40 Yeah, no, he's he's literally carrying like a Tesla sales pitch as he does this televised appearance boosting his new best friends and co-president's company.

Speaker 40 Trump said on TrueSocial, the radical left lunatics are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the world's greatest automakers and Elon's baby, in order to attack and do harm to Elon and everything he stands for.

Speaker 40 Unquote.

Speaker 40 So now, not only has Trump called the Tesla boycott illegal, which is, you know, its own form of unhinged, but on Tuesday, Trump announced that vandalism of Teslas will be labeled as domestic terrorism, promising that perpetrators will quote unquote go through hell.

Speaker 40 White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote, ongoing and heinous acts of violence against Teslas by radical leftist activists are nothing short of domestic terror, unquote.

Speaker 15 So that'll be fun to see how that plays out.

Speaker 15 I feel like we genuinely are not that far off from just like Trump trying to hand down legal mandate saying you must buy a Tesla. Like,

Speaker 15 this is the kind of shit that we're in now.

Speaker 40 No, this is one of the most like bizarre things I've ever seen. If Biden or any Democratic president did anything similar to this, you would have like thralls of people screaming for his impeachment.

Speaker 40 Similar to the Eric Adams thing.

Speaker 40 It's like one of the most blatant open displays of corruption I've ever seen, where a president is using his office to boost the personal financial interests of one of his top advisors, who's also running government agencies, essentially, and doing massive, massive cuts to prohibit their ability to investigate his own businesses, while also taking massive amounts of government money to keep businesses like Tesla and SpaceX operable.

Speaker 40 So this has been a pretty silly thing to watch unfold the past few days. And now Tesla shares have risen 4%

Speaker 40 after Trump's support for Musk and Tesla.

Speaker 15 Great. Well, I think that's going to do it here at us with the ED.

Speaker 15 To play us out, we're going to refer back to our friend, the narcissist Cookbook, who put together our lovely new tariff theme song that you're going to hear every week until tariffs aren't a thing anymore.

Speaker 40 We reported the news.

Speaker 15 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 44 It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 44 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Hap of Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 44 You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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